Posts not Publishing, Various Permission Errors

Hello- New to WordPress, I downloaded and installed it yesterday. I have version 2.3, and I am using Firefox 2.0.0.7.
(I am not a programmer, and know only very basic html- so plain english help in simple steps is going to be most helpful to me!)
I created a MySQL database and installed WP, got it running, had issues with permissions when trying to upload images (fixed that by setting the content folder to 777), but I am not able to publish any posts, create categories, or see posts on the first page (I get the what “what you’re looking for is not here”, bowerbox.com/bowerboxblog)
This is the message I get when trying to create categories or delete and edit posts:
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Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /bowerboxblog/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.33 Server at https://www.bowerbox.com Port 80
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Additionally, the posts I’ve written show up on my Manage page, saying Unpublished and Protected (what does protected mean, and how did they become protected?)
When trying to write posts, I write, save, and hit publish, the box up top says “post saved” but does not publish.
Thanks for any and all help-

-val