I've encountered a few problems and learned a lot about setting up Drupal.

One particular issue is the setup of Captcha module, and it's relative the Textimage module. The captcha module is responsible for presenting a test to the user so as to prevent automated (robot) form submissions (aka spam) in the site registrations, comments, forums etc. The new way of doing this is using math formulas (although apparently robots can do math, so this is not as 'strong' a measure as the more finicky text-based image.) The textimage module is responsible for generating images from text. It is rough around the edges.

The captcha module needed to be patched so that it would not fail validation upon first render. See comment #55 at http://drupal.org/node/114387 where you can get the patch (http://drupal.org/files/issues/captcha_7.patch).

In order to do the textimage module, you need to first have captcha installed and configured. Then download textimage at http://drupal.org/node/114518 One major frustration I had with setting up this module is that it completely fails when you give it a normal system font path. It never tells you that the font path must be writable. So, my suggestion is to create a files/fonts/ path in your installation and then make that writeable just so this module will work. I'm afraid of the potential security problems this creates, but the bug is in the lack of options in the file_check_directory function itself found in includes/file.inc

One other thing to note about textimage is that you must specifically set permissions so that anonymous users can access the images (please explain this to me?) Visit admin/user/access#module-textimage

Once you have textimage installed, you can then choose it as your 'captcha' module option at admin/settings/captcha

A major problem that I had, not related to Drupal, was that I needed to setup SMTP smarthosting so that my domains could send email. It turned out not to be too difficult with some Google juice and Neil's help. The assistance of Geximon helped me to realize that plain old rundlett.com would work as my FDQN mail host setting. I initially tried mail.nbptgnus.org which of course is a good choice but there is no A record or anything in DNS that makes that resolve.