I had the same issue with a blank blog home page after install. My index.php page in the WordPress install directory looked like this…
<html><head>
<title>Untitled</title>
</head>
<body>
<?
?>
</body><html>
<head> <title>Untitled</title></head>
<body>
<?
?>
</body></html></html>
I had a second site and copied the index.php page that read…
<?php
/* Short and sweet */
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>
And it works just fine.
