There are two of them: the Microsoft Personal Web Server and the FrontPage Personal Web Server. What's the difference? Good question. Hard to find an answer. And for the moment we will ignore the question of exactly what it is that a web server does on a computer that is not connected to anything except occasionally when it dials up the Internet.

From Microsoft:

The FrontPage Personal Web Server is available on the FrontPage CD, but was only installed by default with FrontPage 1.1. Subsequent versions of FrontPage installed by default either Microsoft Personal Web Server 1.0 or Microsoft Personal Web Server 2.0.

To detect whether you are running the FrontPage Personal Web Server, launch Microsoft FrontPage and open a Web (File, Open FrontPage Web, server = localhost, click the "list Webs" button). If you are running the FrontPage Personal Web Server, a task bar item reading "Web Server idle" will appear on the Windows task bar. If no "Web Server idle" task bar item appears, then you are not using the FrontPage Personal Web Server.

When you first install FrontPage 98, all other things being equal, it will give you a dialog that says, "Setup has detected that you do not have a Personal Web Server installed. Installation of the Microsoft Personal Web Server before installing Microsoft FrontPage 98 is recommended. Install the Microsoft Personal Web Server now?" This is probably the route most folks follow. If you do so and choose the Custom installation option, then in the list of components to install, the FrontPage Web Server is left unchecked. You can check the box and force the installation of the FrontPage Web Server if you like. If so, at the end of the installation, there is the message, "Setup has detected that you do not have an existing web server that is configured for TCP/IP port 80. Setup will configure the new Microsoft FrontPage Personal Web Server to run on TCP/IP port '8080'. When you connect to this server using the FrontPage Explorer or a browser, you will need to append '8080' to the server name. For example, if your machine is called 'beethoven', you would browse to it by typing 'http://beethoven:8080'."

There are some apparent differences between the two servers. The FrontPage Personal Web Server requires an administrative name and password for operations. It also defaults to web files being located at C:\FrontPage Webs\Content, whereas the other one defaults to C:\Webshare\WWWRoot. The default page is index.htm for the former and default.htm for the latter, although this can easily be changed in the file C:\WINDOWS\frontpg.ini.

The file C:\WINDOWS\frontpg.ini contains an entry to indicate where the server files are stored: PWSRoot=C:\FrontPage Webs. In the same file under [Port 80], there will be the entry serverconfig=C:\FrontPage Webs\Server\conf\httpd.cnf.

Trying to find the subtleties of choice between these two servers on the Microsoft site has been quite frustrating. The search for the answer to the dilemma continues. Stay tuned.