I was trying to get Drupal installed on a shared linux host and having no luck at it. After a few hours of 500 error pages I went to sleep.
Woke up fresh (well sort of) and bit the bullet and did a Google search... Came across this forum post and that solved it. I had to edit my httpd.conf file and change the line:
AllowOverride FileInfo Options
to
AllowOverride All
And up popped the the Drupal installation wizard! Yeah. I wish this was on the Drupal site for the installation (anyone listening?).