My installation problems…

I installed as per the 5 minute instructions, and the first thing that happened was at the top of each install step page I got the following:

WordPress database error: [Table ‘breng.wp_options’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘permalink_structure’

WordPress database error: [Table ‘breng.wp_options’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘category_base’

WordPress database error: [Table ‘breng.wp_options’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘siteurl’

WordPress database error: [Table ‘breng.wp_options’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘hack_file’

WordPress database error: [Table ‘breng.wp_options’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’

WordPress database error: [Table ‘breng.wp_options’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘template’

I figured that was strange, but it all seemed to work anyway, the database was created, I got my admin password, and logged in successfully. But on the admin dashboard https://www.br-eng.info/words/wp-admin/ all the links are relative to /, instead of /words, where I installed it to. So none of them work. Same on the main blog page https://www.br-eng.info/words/

If I manually type in the URL, adding the words/ directory, they all work, but all the links are wrong. I didn’t change the line in wp-config.php that sets ABSPATH, so what’s happening?

PHP 4.3.10
MySQL 4.0.22

Thanks for any help.