Grrrrr! Definitive guide for setup on XP Pro?

I had to do a system restore yesterday and basically blew out my PHP setup. What I seem to not be able to find is a definitive guide to setting up PHP properly. I have followed the install guidelines on php.net (documentation) for Windows. What I found though before, was that it was not completely accurate and some of the comments helped. For instance, in the documentation it says to put php.ini into the root directory, which by the way suggested would be /winnt. No there is no /winnt under XP. So following the other possiblity I dropped it into /windows. Nothing happened so following someone's comment I put it into /system 32 along with php4apache2 and php4ts. This seemed to turn it on. This though confuses me as it still states to reference php4apache2 in the http.conf file as apache/sapi/php4apache2. If I copied it over to system32 should I reference it there. Anyway is there a definitive guide for install, or some proven method to get PHP 4.3.2, Apache 2 (latest stable) and XP Pro all singing the same tune? Thanks Stuart