I'm now connected to a network server. Thankyou all for your help. This has been a real learning experience.
I think my main problem is that I was trying to connect to a network server that did not allow remote connections. I was able to remedy this in the Surface Area Configuration for Services and Connections.
I also needed to grant admin rights to my windows account and was able to accomplish this by adding a new administrator, again using the same Surface Area tool mentioned above.
The error log and services.msc tool were also helpful.
Thanks again for helping me out.