Concerning your IIS trouble... you say it was working then unexpectedly stopped working. Probably your easiest route is to get that working again. Can you browse to http://localhost and see any files? If you create a default.htm or index.htm in your wwwroot folder, do you see it? If not, your problem may simply be that IIS is not running. Right-click My Computer, choose Manage, then expand Services in the tree. You'll see an entry for IIS. Open it, right click the default web server and start it.
If you want to install Apache and configure it for PHP (something I highly recommend), then check out my WAMP HOWTO at www.troywolf.com/articles .