civicrm 1.7: blank page during event setup; unable to view live or test membership signup page

I tried unsuccessfully to get custom fields to work in drupal 4.7 and civicrm CiviCRM 1.7.9379, so I upgraded to drupal 5.1 and CiviCRM 1.7.9682.

Now, I have gone through the setup and although it looks promising, I keep hitting glitches:

1. I seemed to have successfully created a membership only online contribution page, but when I try to view either the live or the test versions, I get a failure to redirect (time out).

2. I got half-way through creating an event page, but when I try to save the event's address, I get a blank page. I noticed that the URL goes from index.php/?q=civicrm/admin/event to index.php?q=civicrm/admin/event -- the slash after the index.php is gone. If I put it back in manually, I'm brought back to the page I saved, not the next step.

Are these results of my misconfigurations?

I'd appreciate any suggestions.

David