Before you get blasted by the regulars, be sure you turn off HTML before you post again to the mailing groups - In order to allow Zope code to be included in notes and display correctly without being rendered, the newsgroup intentionally does NOT render HTML and instead displays your note buried in a pile of html tags and mime boundaries!

As best I can tell, since Python is such a base layer language, every version called 'windows' runs on W95 - XP and everything in between. The windows binaries all have win32 in their titles to distinguish them from the linux and unix variations

The Zope 2.5.1 install will automatically install Python 2.1.3. It works "out of the box", slick as anything. Your learning curve will be the challenge because there are three general styles of interfacing.

The only thing missing in this setup is the Python Imaging Library, a/k/a PIL. You will need it only if you go into image manipulation like server-size resizing on the fly. You will know when you add products and they say that they need PIL installed.

I suggest you search for and download the 'Zope Shelf' - it is a cool collection of the relevant documentation. The best starting place is the on-line tutorial and the Zope Book. A word of warning - Zope, in its evolution, has two major alternative ways of doing things. They are very different and can confuse the novice.

The older means is through 'dtml' which takes a lego building block approach to plugging in to site features. Its great for reusability. It doesn't play well with html designers in that it is a one-way street. Once you convert a page design into dtml components, you cannot go back and use dreamweaver or go-live as effectively to fine tune the page.

The newer means is by ZPT or Zope page templates. It is less intuitive to read but it plays really well with html designers. In general you use a designer to lay out a 'pro forma' page and then use ZPT to make the page dynamic by substituting images, text, etc for the pro-forma tags as it is rendered. A product like WebDrive lets you treat the Zope database as just another hard drive so your editor thinks it is working on files in the local filesystem.

I point this out because the Zope Book alternates between them as you go from basic to advanced chapters. If you know that ZPT is right for you because it separates the content design from the presentation logic and allows specialists to do each, don't confuse yourself by spending too much time with the dtml approach. Eventually you will want to know both (and Python for the real programmatic work), but try to focus on one or the other approaches and stick to it until the phlosophical approach settles in and becomes intuitive and the syntax is comfortable. My early hours of frustration came primarily from confusing the two syntax and function/method names because I didn't know to treat methods and templates as pretty much mutually-exclusive was of approaching a complete solution. While one can implement the other, blended solutions get messy.