Well, here is the beginning of what promises to be one hell of a long ride. Being of the short attention-spanned variety, I have my doubts as to whether I will actually finish this installation anytime soon.
The goal is a fully configured, customized installation of an ecommerce application. I have had some familiarity with Zencart in the past, and was going to reinstall it after a server wipe (stay away from godaddy for anything but domain registration!!!!!!!). But then I found out about Magento and have been reading on it. Between the two, I think Zencart is somewhat easier to install and configure (but it is no picnic! For any user-hosted e-commerce application, expect to spend a solid 30 days betwen figuring out installation, catalog configuration/importing, theme customization, module implementation, and bug fixing. Unless, of course, you are a pro. But I am assuming you are like me, more or less a noob, and are going through a maddeningly steep and very slow learning curve.)
Magento seems to be more full-featured and benefits from newer code from a smaller number of developers. You can argue ad infinitum which model produces better code, but I think for a specific application like an ecommerce app, the company behind Magento, Varien LLC, seems to be doing a good job. If their documentation sucks for newbies, it’s created a large class of professional Magento designers who love that fact, so who am I to argue?
This is going to be a bitch. Like I said, I’m no programmer. But I will do my best to log everything I do, to get my installation working with a series of modules. I am building a series of tshirt sites, which will hopefully all share a common customer login and allow cross promotion across URLs. It’s ambitious, and it’s easily the kind of project you could throw $5G at between designers and programming. Unfortunately for everyone, I don’t yet have that kinda loot. And if I did, I’d be buying blank t-shirts with it 
Hopefully this log will help someone else down the line, in addition to serving as a space where I can sort out what I am doing and why.