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OK... I will be trying Acquia Drupal Stack Installer instead of the WAMP/LAMP/MAMP solution... The documentation needs to be updated.

Hi bekasu,

If you download the latest version of WAMP/LAMP/MAMP, then you will get PHP 5.3.0 which is not compatible with Drupal 6. The documentation is not clear enough, resulting in many users downloading the latest version (If you see the number of requests for clarification).

Here is the problem text:
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In this section you will learn how to set up a local test site on your Windows box. Several packages exist which install Apache, PHP, MySQL and some other useful components in one easy download. These include the following:

ApacheFriends XAMPP
WampServer 2
Uniform Server
Web.Developer Suite (commercial product)
A comparison of many packages can be found at Wikipedia.

The following packages also includes Drupal as part of the installation:

BitNami Drupal Stack
SpikeWAMP
Alternatively, you can take the difficult option and install each component (Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc) manually. For this, check out the relevant links below.
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(Source = http://drupal.org/node/263)

There is a link on this page takes you directly to where you can download WAMP (http://www.wampserver.com/en/) where the versions are listed - HOWEVER - there is no reminder of what version is needed - in fact the implication from the text above is that its OK to download and use Apache 2.2.11, MySQL 5.1.36, PHP 5.3.0. Fortunately I had and remembered that PHP 5.3.0 would not work with Drupal 6.

On sourceforge (my first visit there), I could find two versions of WAMP Server and both did not give the versions or PHP, Apache or MySQL (see attached). I could not find 20 versions as you say are there.

I rated this critical because it renders the documentation unusable which is consistent with the priority description. The number of queries that have resulted from mostly newbies using PHP 5.3.0 make this an important issue.

Great solution. Had already referenced it to one forum discussion - will have a look at referencing more later today. I can see that my search "wamp server" on sourceforge yielded less results than "wampserver" (no space) - I'll be alert to that subtle difference in the future... my confidence in using Drupal is growing by the minute thanks in part to your attention!