jQuery tabbed blocks

I'm running the latest Drupal (5.8 I think) and have spent the past few hours investigating and trying to implement tabbed blocks, in order to save on real estate on the home page. But I've yet to have any success whatsoever, so I'm hoping that someone who has got this working can lend a hand.

I had hoped that I could accomplish something like this:

1. create a theme region called "latest"
2. assign a custom 'recent forum message block' & 'recent comments block' to this region
3. have all blocks assigned to the 'latest' region be displayed in tabs using jQuery

and if possible:

4. display this tabbed series of blocks within a column using the Panels module.

I'd then repeat the process, so I could assign blocks to additional regions on the page.

First, I tried the method as explained here:
"Generate tabs for blocks using jQuery" -- http://drupal.org/node/89338
I managed to add new theme regions without any problem, however, that's as far as I got. I can assign the blocks to the new regions, but they just display one after another on the page. The doc says "Place all the files into your theme folder including the css files included with the plugin. From there it should function" ... but not for me. There are further notes down the page, but the explanations flew cheerfully over my head.

Then I saw the "tabs" module, within the Javascript tools group of modules:
http://drupal.org/project/jstools
There was a link to download a jQuery tabs plugin, which eventually lead to this page: http://ui.jquery.com/download_builder/. I downloaded the entire package just to be safe. Uploaded files to my theme directory, as well as to the /misc directory since I wasn't sure exactly where they had to go. The module itself was light on documentation, but I downloaded the dev version, as it had some sort of example. But it didn't help. No tabs.

Then I tried the "magic tabs" module:
http://drupal.org/project/magic_tabs
This one doesn't have an admin UI, but I read the readme file and managed to get it to almost work -- that is, it prints out some example tabs...but as a list, it doesn't actually tab anything.

Looking forward to any suggestions that might lead me to getting this implemented! Thanks.