Not understanding things…

Hi. If I’m missing some documentation, please, by all means, point me to it. All I can find is the five-minute installation, which does me no good, and the FAQ, which doesn’t help either. I’ve searched the forum and either haven’t found or haven’t understood if I have the same problem. I’m a graphic designer, so I’m new to PHP and SQL, so most of this seems pretty over my head…
My problem is this: I can’t get wp to see the database. Not sure if I did this correctly, but here’s what I did:
I modified the wp-config.php file to fit my settings. A screenshot of my config file can be located here.
Then I uploaded the whole wordpress folder to \public_html\wordpress\. I chmod’ed the wp-admin folder and my wp-config.php file to prohibit public access, although for the record I get the same problems even with the default permissions.
I made a new sql database from the ‘control panel’ my hoster gives me. What I did can be seen here. As you can see, I created a sql database called nokicat_blog. I then created user nokicat_wp and gave it full priveliges for database nokicat_blog. I also went into phpMyAdmin (here and here are the two frames from the page; the index page didn’t work) to see if everything was configured correctly, and everything appears to be… The Linux server runs PHP 4.3.8 and mySQL 4.0.20-standard. Everything is configured for localhost, as you can see, and I know the password is correct. Are my folders in the wrong places?
And, as a result of this, I get to see this. Also, I just realized I had to give public access again to wp-config.php in order to make it work, so how on earth can you keep the password private? Am I crazy, or is there just no documentation anywhere about this? If there is, point me to it, I will gladly read it instead of wasting forum time.
Thanks,
Ryan