I'm not sure what I can do to help out here but...

My skillset is HTML/XHTMl, CSS, PHP, MySQL....

I've setup EoCMS under my local apache2 webserver, Just for reference I've got it set up properly but I had to manually change some file permissions along the way to get it to work properly. a lot of the folders weren't setup initially with correct read/write permissions

Welcome glad to have you here. Im nearly ready for the next release. However I need the bugs found as this is going in the 110mb.com 1 click application installer.

Read/Write permissions... hmmm you should only need to make sure the config.php has read/write permissions when you install and if your installing with SQLite you need to give the entire directory the CMS is in read/write permissions...

when i downloaded it and unzipped it directly into my www path, none of the files has any access for others, and the folders never had executable privileges, it may have been soemthing I did but all i did was download -> extract directly into the www path...

Thats strange. However it does not seem like a problem with the CMS itself

what system & server are you using primefalcon

I dont ever get these issues as I have my own php unzipper, and I upload the zip through php form too..