Ive tried installing PHP on my home machine(XP Pro SP2). I found numerous help files out there online and all seem to describe the same thing and it doesnt work on my computer. Is it normally hard to setup php5 on an IIS XP machine? Im just hoping someone can give me some references or links to sites that better explains how to do this. All my previous experience is with .Net and thats relatively simple to get working on a microsoft machine. If anyone can give me a better idea on how to get started I would appreciate it MUCHO because the all the different internet articles are contradictory. Thanks in advance.

I am not sure how popular is to have PHP over IIS, but if you are looking at testing PHP on window based machine, perhaps you can try out this :-

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html

If I were you I would install WAMP Server 2.0. You can find it here:
http://www.wampserver.com/en/

Basically, it will install Apache, PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin and SQLLiteManager all for you, without the mess. I use it myself, and it works extremely well. I at one point wrote a tutorial on how to install it, but I have not yet done so for the new version. It is fairly simple, but I can write another tutorial if there is sufficient demand.

Hope that helps.