I am trying to set up my 8600GT to be used to mine solo, but, unfortunately, I am an idiot and don't know much about this kind of stuff.  I'd find it pretty helpful.

I had a hell of a time getting a GPU miner to run on Windows until I switched to PuddinPop's miners.  Only gotchas, make sure you have the NVidia CUDA driver installed, and on XP, you'll need the MSVC80 runtime environment (free from Microsoft, requires no configuration, and you have a good chance of already having it installed from something else).