Windows XP home + localhost problem

I'm new to this forum. I have read many other similar problems reported so hopefully I will try to answer the obvious questions.

I cannot see 'http://localhost'

I have a laptop with win 2000, Vs.net and software works fine, however hardware is dying!
I have purchased a new PC with Windows XP home edition. Installed Visual Studio. Unfortunately I then found out that IIS is not installed as standard.
I installed IIS version 5.00 using the method I found which I believed was described as a 'kludge' somewhere else in the forum !
IIS appears to work fine.
Default website directory is C:\inetpub\wwwroot

I have compared the settings of IIS on the two machines and can find no appreciable differences.
I have de-activated the firewall and turned the Anti-Virus off.
I have NO boxes ticked in the Tools / Internet options / Connections / Lan Settings.
localhost appears in the hosts file and I can ping it successfully.

I converted the File System from FAT32 to NTFS to see if it made a difference, it didn't

To-date no luck !

One difference I can spot between the two machines is the one that is working has localhost appearing in 'My Network Places' and in the NetHood folder for the logged on user under 'Documents and Settings', the one that is not working does not !

How do I make it appear, and is this the cause of my problem ?
Someone suggested the IIS should be installed prior to VS.net. is this true, do I need to un-install .net and start again.

Any suggestions appreciated as I've been working on this for days now.

Thanks

Your first problem was using a kludge to install IIS on XP Home, which it doesn't support.
So, I expect any and all problems you are having regarding this are directly related to installing IIS on an OS that doesn't support it.
You probably won't find any assistance with any problems you run into because this isn't
a) proven to work correctly all the time
b) documented
c) supported

How can you say this when you can't view http://localhost

In any case, you can ask at the site where you found the kludge, which is a term I've used previously about IIS on XP Home. Personally, I would never try to add IIS to XP home unless I didn't care about the computer working reliably.

Get XP Pro and remove the headaches, although now that you have force-fed some files on your XP Home it's possible you won't be able to upgrade to XP Pro successfully, you may need to do a complete reformat and installation of XP Pro.

Thanks Guys,

Unfortunately I have done this for learning purposes and not for a business solution.

If it was a pure business solution then I most probably would have gone XP pro in the first instance.

For home use however I cannot ever justify paying almost as much for a piece of XP Pro upgrade software than I paid for a complete new PC.
Lets face it, XP Pro doesn't have much in the way of extra features. That's most probably why 99% all PC's sold in retail stores come bundled with home edition.

99% of PC's sold in retail stores don't require IIS

Yes, you can do that, because I have Win XP Home Edition and installed the IIS 5.0 following the steps to do that, and I had the same problem than you http://localhost/ failed and the solution you can find here http://www.governmentsecurity.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=471&st=0&#entry1352 check point 13. Now I can run ASP pages in my personal web server IIS 5.0 on WIN XP Home Edition. Everybody say that doesn't work but work really fine on me. Cool......