I think I ran the Squeak program from the Zip file, what I thought was the setup program, but it was squeak.exe and all it did was open up two more windows, one which said a word of caution that it may be confusing for novices, and the other was like just blah-blah-blah as far as I could comprehend it. No setup wizard, and the readme.txt while 24K in size, does not format well in Notepad, and I cannot figure out right now how to put it into Wordpard or Word to get the text formatting correct. Do I just unzip these files into a directory and then run the squeak.exe program (my best guess?) or is there an installer that I missed downloading somewhere? I cannot quite figure this out, no lie!

It sounds like you succeeded in getting it running - unzipped the files and there should have been 4 files I think. One Squeak.exe, one ending in .image (thats your memory image), a .sources file, and a .changes (I think). Generally the .image is your "project" file - open that with Squeak.exe.

The readme is read in Squeak itself - its one of the windows I think. I agree its a bit intimidating. You should also have seen the Squeak mouse following your mouse pointer around with its eyes - yes?

Squeak uses popup menus that you get by cliking in an empty spot in the squeak desktop (the main squeak window - make it as large as you can). First thing I would do is click in an empty part of the squeak desktop and open the menu - select "save as" and pick a project name. The original image file you use as a template for new projects - always save as something else when you are going to start something.

Try a simple web app - here's how you get your setup wizards...

Click in the squeak desktop to open the main menu and select "open...".
Another menu opens immediately, select "Package Loader" - it will ask if you want to install SqueakMap. SqueakMap is kinda like cpan for perl or debian package loader. All the packages live on a central server and you can select one and say "install".

Once you get the package loader window with all the packages, you can do several different things - depending on what you want to do.

I suggest you try doing a simple web app. Which means you need Commanche (a web server) and Seaside. If you select Commanche in the package browser list, then alt-click in that list you should get a popup menu saying "install". Do that. Then select Seaside and install that.

Now go to [link|http://www.beta4.com/seaside2/|http://www.beta4.com/seaside2/] and click on the link to the tutorial.
It will tell you how to start the app server and play with the sample applications. Plus, from here on out you can develop from the web browser if you like.

Good luck.