Best Advice

[Ciji]

I appreciate the help you both offer.

Blackdragon, I didnt know there was a different config for SoD client. Thanks for posting this for me.

Caryatis, I have no intentions of just giving up. I did before, just because it was so close to baby's birth and figured I would just scrap it and pick it up once things fell back into a "norm".
I didn't post anything about the error messages, just because I wanted to ensure there wasn't something hardware/ OS related I didn't know about that may cause issues before I even started. Now knowing that OS really doesnt make a difference at all, then I will just delete the server 2008 partition and work straight from Win7, allowing me to do daily things while learning a thing or two about the server.
What I meant by the custom server stuff was, I remember reading in one of the guides something to the effect of "This guide is meant for setting up an 'out of the box' server, and if you want to customize it you should seek another guide".. This is why I asked if there was more than one way to install, and if it affected the way it would be operated/ changed.
I will start fresh on the guide again, ensuring I didn't do something wrong along the way and post specific errors if any this time around.
On a related note however, you said to ignore the minilogin portion... If i do that, is there a replacement program I should use? Or is it optional to begin with?

[Caryatis]

Honestly 99% of people should never even bother with minilogin, it causes more headaches than it solves by far(just have a look around at all the threads asking why it doesnt matter what login information people use, they all log into the same account).

There is no need to do anything, just set up your server.bat file(not including any of the minilogin stuff) and then run that(it will launch your world.exe and the zone.exe) which is all you need running to have a server functional. This will use the eqemu login server.