Well,
I have the board installed, no error messages. I guess my persistence up front paid off at the end.
I still never got phpmyadmin to work. I'll probably just delete it and use the MySQL GUIs instead, probably better from a security perspective anyway.
If anyone has helpful hints about phpmyadmin, let me know, along with what version.
I ended up with PHP 5 and MySQL 4.1.20.
Fred