Thanks for the enthusiastic praise.

You’re welcome and thanks for the feedback.

No, it wouldn’t show the password for root.
If you have an account that has certain parts of Joomla! loocked out, then you are pretty much out of luck – unless you can convince the Joomla! administrator to give you move priviledges.
If you are the one who created the site and install, then you must have somehow limited your priviledges. What I would recommend, is doing a fresh install and testing from there.

You should be able to. Remember, the default password for ‘root’ is nothing – just an empty field.
If, you created a password for ‘root’ then you need to use that password. However, I doubt you created a root password because that would cause other problems with your XAMPP install.

The error “Could not connect to the database. Connector returned number: 2” usually occurs when you have entered incorrect database information.
Unless you have changed the user and password information, it should be localhost for the host name, root for the user, and the password field should be left empty.
Of course, all this assumes you are trying to install Joomla! under the default XAMPP installation.
If you are trying to install Joomla! in a different installation – for example, on a web host – then you need to enter the corect server name, user and password:
localhost and root won’t work.
As well, if you are using XAMPP, I recommend version 1.7.3 instead of 1.7.4 or 1.7.7 (the lat one won’t wok propely on my Windows 7 machine). Instructions for installing XAMPP 1.7.3 can be found here.
Please let me know how things work out.

At first I thought the message “Restricted index access” was coming from the OS. The problem with the message is that it is vague – hopelessly so.
On further searching, it appears this error message comes from PHP files in the joomla! install. Searching through the Joomla! 1.7.3 files did not reveal any code with a line similar to:
defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted index access' );
However, the file default.php does have the line:
defined('_JEXEC') or die('Restricted access');
which is similar but not identical. Perhaps they have updated the message from earlier versions. Unfortunately, I don’t have earlier versions of Joomla! to search through.
Since Joomla! 1.7.x is now obsolete, having been replaced with Joomla 2.5.x, I would recommend using 2.5 instead. Perhaps this will cause the error to go away.
Another possibility is that you are using a component or template that tries to access default.php directly – and this is causing the error.
On the other hand, if this message is not coming from the Joomla! core, then it may be coming from some installed Joomla! component.
Sorry I can’t be more help.

Hello again,
Thx for your response. I’m actually running Vista and this is where i extracted the file to:
file:///C:/xampp/htdocs/joomla/
the page lists all the actual folders and files I have in Joomla and that they were modified right after the installation on 1/24.