MiniMatt

I'd definitely look at one of those open CMS projects, as Jabba says, it's not really taking power out your hands (I know the feeling of wanting to know how stuff works from the ground up rather than just take a pre-programmed solution) as all they are is a bunch of PHP scripts hooking to a back end DB, you're more than able to hack about with the scripts directly, and if you know a smattering of Perl then you'll be able to understand what's going on.

I'd forgotten about Xoops, used that one some time back and liked it. mySQL will sit happy on Windose too so no worries with that. Know what you mean about the Windows/Linux thing; I'm the same, I know I could potentially get better results with Linux but I also know that with my knowledge I'll generally get a decent working solution together much quicker with Windows.