E-Commerce: Signing Up With Payment

I am convinced that Drupal has the tools I need to sell
online. However, I am very frustrated because I cannot
seem to get the pieces to work. Ok, enough complaining.
Here's a look at the steps I need help with.

I am so positive others have these same questions so
hopefully when they are addressed they can help all you
who have these same questions that need answers.

Goal: To sell events using the signup or event module
with Authorize.net as the payment gateway.

Using: I am setup with Drupal 5.5 running on mySQL 5.0
and PHP 5.2.4.

Roadblocks: Here's the steps I am taking to install this
setup.

1. Install Module: E-Commerce (5.x, 3.4)
2. Install Module: Signup (5.x, 2.3)
3. Install Module: Token (5.x, 1.9)

What I know: You don't need to have all of this stuff
intalled. I know you can pull this off with e-commerce,
token (which is needed for e-commerce) and either
signup or the event module. What is UNclear to me is
which one, event or signup?

Here's the problem: When I have signup installed, there
is simply NO WAY to make e-commerce understand that
you want to use signup to sell! Also I don't get a price
input on the product (Create Content > Product) when
I try to create a product. I liked the alpha6 (I'm talking
about e-commerce module version) because if you tried
to enable the store it would enable much of what was
needed to get going. In the older stable version of
e-commerce you cannot seem to get things going.

The bottom line.

If someone could just shove everything aside for a few
hours and say look, here's how you can sell this type
of product -- here's what MODULES you need, and here's
the steps, Step-By-Step -- with a limited amount of
assumptions. I'm a developer and I can't get this thing
working (Voice: "so that does that say about you?", lol).

Maybe I"m dumb, but I cannot seem to get this working
and I really need to understand how this stuff is working.

Hopefully someone could help me here. I would even be
willing to pay someone to hep me out. However, I'm sure
this is quite simple.

Any takers?

I want to make it clear as well, that I am grateful for this
software, especially that it's free. This is more of a quetion
than a complaint. I really appreciate this CMS. In my mind
I categorize like this... there's CMS's and then there's Drupal!

Help!