Ok, so after giving up on installing MT ("tech support" still hasn't replied on the module installation issue, and it's been five days... granted, there was the weekend inbetween, but in theory they offer tech support via email Monday-Friday 9am-11pm, Saturday-Sunday 11am-10pm... and I never heard anything from them after 7pm, nor in the weekend, despite repeated emails), I went and installed pMachine.
The installation process ran without a hitch... hey cool, I thought, this is actually working, I'll just have to configure it and then I can go back to do stuff that doesn't give me a headache.
I go to the login screen, and there's no submit button on it. Doublechecking the FTP'd files turns up that the FTP server had been timing out on me (without spitting out any error, so I didn't notice at all until I rechecked) and so half the config files were 0 bytes in size.
I grumbled a bit, reuploaded the whole thing, still wouldn't work. So I redid the installation process - it went without a hitch again. And there was a submit button on the login screen and all! So I could login to the CP.
For two whole minutes.
I started looking around to see where the templates were, how I could configure things... added two categories... clicked on another option... "login", it tells me. Fine, I input username and password again, thinking it's some security feature... invalid username and password. Fine, I'll have the password sent to my email address... "Could not find your email in the database."
Now, I'd just installed it five minutes earlier. And it was working then. Maybe something happened to the database...?
(The single allowed database that "tech support" had to install for me, because of course it was too difficult to provide clients with a working control panel that could install databases on its own and a non-contradicting FAQ... "you can create the database from the comfort of your CP", says an answer, and another says, "email us to have us create your database". Siiiiigh.)
I open the phpMyAdmin control panel (an ancient version - 2.2.6 - is all the webhost provided, and I had to install it myself, and it's badly translated in Italian... only half-translated, so it's quite incomprehensible if you don't have a clue how it works... "easy management of your MySQL database" my ass)... "no tables in the database", it says.
...
I run the install once more, then go check again. Yep, still no tables in the database. The hell?
And then I notice a nice error message.
User 'answeridx' has exceeded the 'max_questions' resource (current value: 1000)
......
I have not the words.
Wait, I have them.
Italian people looking for webhosts? Stay the fuck away from consultingweb.it. True, their smallest hosting plan and their domain registration cost very little (and that's probably what drew supervisor guy to register with them), but they're absolutely horrid in terms of tech support, ease of use and services provided. So stay away, and get a webhost worth your time and money.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go see what I can cobble together with Blogger or a similar remotely hosted system... ¬¬