Cant set up classipress on local host
I am stuck in this problem for a few hours now.
I am a total programming newb, so please simple answers ! I have set up a local host using xampp on my hard drive, installed
wp, installed classipress. Admin side of things looks fine, and home page also, however whatever I click on the homepage give me an error 404. I read I might need to tweak the permalink setting (I have tried everything here) but whenever I even press the tab (settings -> permalinks) an htaccess file is generated which makes anything I do (admin or site) return an error 500. The fix is to delete the file, which brings me back to point A.
How do I fix this problem and get full functionality of the site on my local host ?
Thank you