Chasing my tail trying to get started

[arbalest]

Trouble with the both the windows binaries and the
nightly builds.

I've downloaded the "stable" version and from what I've
read here it might be too old to bother posting questions
on individual problems.  I can build and run a "hello world"
program alright but for starters there are no project
templates and the debugger commands are dimmed out
and I don't see any place to set the target as "debug".

I've downloaded the three components of the latest and
not-so-latest nightly builds and downloaded and installed
7-zip. Yet, with every way I might attempt to use 7-zip
I get an error trying to open/extract from the *.7z file
with "Can not open.... as Archive".

Any help would be appreciated.

For what it's worth, the particular machine I have tried
this on is running Win2000 Professional.  Just happens
to be the machine I try out new S/W on.  I really would
like to move away from Visual Studio as a matter of
principal even though I already own it.  But the move
has to be a little easier...

[stahta01]

Did you try a stable version of 7-zip to extract the files?

http://www.7-zip.org/

Tim S

[arbalest]

Downloaded just today from the 7-Zip home page.  The 7-Zip
file manager does run.  But no luck actually extracting anything.

[arbalest]

I downloaded the nightlies again and this this time it worked
(was able to extract and execute).  Same files, different file
sizes this time. Apparently my previous downloads failed. :?