I downloaded drupal 7.17 with XAMPP running already when I http://localhost/~username/drupal-7.17 I got an 500 Internal server error

The reply on the web page is

Server error!

The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there was an error in a CGI script.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.

Error 500

localhost
Fri Nov 16 13:47:31 2012
Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l PHP/5.3.1 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1

Thanks for help

When I put drupal at my hosting provider more is happening but no reply on this url:

http://jophosting.host-ed.me/drupal-7.17/install.php

The install.php part was generated by the site itself.

John