Ok, so I finally managed to install Rails on my Windows machine, as described here: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html Some points: * The gem installer locks up during this stage: "Updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org". There appears to be no easy fix for this, other than downloading the packages manually, and installing them in this order: rake actionsupport actionpack activerecord actionservice actionwebservice actionmailer rails * If you are running the Ciphire mail encryption app (www.ciphire.com), then the WEBrick web server will lock up whenever you try to access it. The only fix I could discover is to uninstall Ciphire. * The original OnLamp article recommends turning off password authentication in MySQL, because Rails doesn''t support it. That''s bad. Keep the password authentication on; the latest version of Rails supports it already (as the second part of the article mentions).