C.R.,
If you're developing on Windows, but deploying on *nix, have you considered using VMWare? I struggled a bit with ACS development using AOLServer on Windows and though I was pretty happy with it, it was a relief when I switched to using VMWare to run Linux on my Windows box and everything just worked all of the sudden.
I've built a virtual machine with openacs 4.0 that you could download, and wrote up a page about my VM project, and the potential benefits towards OpenACS advocacy.
If you or anybody else would like to take it for a spin, let me know and I'll arrange FTP access. I can't publish a URL to the VM file directly because of bandwidth restrictions.
