How Do I Get My Local Site Working As Well As My Test Site Does Now

Hi,
I'm a fairly new Drupal user. I know just enough PHP and SQL to be dangerous. I have a programming background. I am just learning the basics of PHPMyAdmin. Whoever answers this may need to be patient and explain things without jargon. And thanks in advance.

What do I need to do to get my local site functioning as well as my remote, test site?

What I did:

Used PHPMyAdmin and FTP to back up my test site onto my local computer. I used the feature that creates SQL and recreates all the tables and populates the data.

Result: successful.

I also grabbed everything under my Drupal folder and brought it down to my local computer.

I used PHPMyAdmin to create a local database.

Installed XAMPP and Drupal onto my local computer.

Result: success.

Tried to log onto the new test site:
Failed.

Followed the instructions at the trouble shooting section of Drupal.org and disabled Clean URLS.

Now I can log in and see everything on the site except my status report.

I went back and read the "How to Troubleshoot" section. Found that I could read the logs on my site by viewing a report from the Administer menu. I looked that the report.

I also tried to start comparing the two systems. Here's what I know so far.

Old site:
PHP 5.2.9
Apache/2.2.11 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8i PHP/5.2.9 mod_jk/1.2.27    
Apache is listening on port 81.

New site:
PHP 5.3.0
Apache/2.2.12 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.12 OpenSSL/0.9.8k mod_autoindex_color PHP/5.3.0 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.0    
Apache is listening on port 80

Error message on new site:
warning: Parameter 1 to theme_status_report() expected to be a reference, value given in C:\xampp\htdocs\drupal\includes\theme.inc on line 617.

I'm also getting similar errrors.

There's another error I'm getting. It says:

: Function ereg() is deprecated in C:\xampp\htdocs\drupal\includes\file.inc on line 895.

I'm getting a lot of these types of errors.

I attempted to look in my php.ini file to see if I could make it stop reporting these errors about deprecated functions, but so far have not figured that out. I think I can figure it out with experimentation. I also want to get clean URL's working again and be able to see my status report.

Thanks for reading.

Jim