PowerStore 2 installation for multiple sites and existing sites...

Wow...I must admit I am feeling overwhelmed but am going to try to reserve judgment...I bought PowerStore 2 last night, started the installation process. Have some quirks to work out and with my time constraints hoped to work most of them out with a phone call to "tech support"...which, I find, is not given over the phone, only through this forum. I have to admit that is disappointing with the price of the software, but again, I will try to reserve judgement. It eliminates the possibility that any problem can be worked out in a single sitting, because it requires waiting for answers over long periods.

I will give it a shot.

I am hoping to install on two machines: 1 laptop using Vista, 1 Desktop using Windows XP. I'm one of the people dealing with the PDF issue, but so far the work around is helping...but would really like a better resolution.

I have very limited experience with PHP, but spent a good deal of time following one of the tutorials setting up a local testing server using IIS7, only to find in another tutorial that WA recommends against using IIS7, so now I am not sure whether to continue with that, or to dump it, disable it, and get XAMMP? Does PS@ work better with XAMMP? Would life be easier?

Further, here is where my situation becomes complicated and makes forum support a bit daunting.

I plan to use the PS2 program for multiple sites, and I couldn't find any instructions on the best way to set up for such use, or how you integrate the program with each individual site. Do you download the entire program into each site folder on the local machine and upload to the remote server?

And the really tricky thing is, the first web site I need the shopping cart for is an existing html site (css/html) that we would like to integrate PowerStore into and use the same backgrounds etc as the regular site. We started off using a "free" open source shopping cart and simply created a "store" folder that the shopping cart was installed in and our regular pages linked to the store pages. It worked "okay" but was too clunky, clumsy and downright ugly. However, because we did have that shopping cart (I deleted those files from the local and remote site) we still have the database on our servers.

Where I am now:

Powerstore 2 program downloaded into a folder on an external drive that I hope to share between 2 computers.

Started setting up a testing server on the laptop (usual one for store work) using IIS7...but stopped when I got to the part that says WA recommends against IIS. Not sure what to do there.

Do I copy all the powerstore2 files into the site folder for my existing site, then start setting up admin, configurations, and page modifications there? Is it possible to do all of that without setting up my testing server locally and just uploading the changes and looking at them live or is that too dangerous? I know it is slow, but we are so behind on this project because of the crappy free cart (I know, you get what you pay for...) that I don't know how much time I have to mess with the local server stuff.

I have a linux server on hostgator, and as I said, have a database created there. Can I use the same database, or should I delete the old one and start from scratch, leave it for now (it is small) and just start a new one?

I appreciate any help from any port in the storm. I realize this is a lot, but that's why I was hoping I could ask a lot of these questions on the phone. Thanks again...I will say the less complicated questions I asked a couple weeks ago got very good responses...I just didn't think I would have to do the actual installation help on a forum.