Rebooting to answer your questions-

Yes, I did get that.

I don't understand what I have not followed as far as (which instruction) will get me to where I need to be.

Starting at the beginning retracing my steps and trying again--

A friend is helping me here at home. Perhaps he will see what I have missed.

I think I see where I have failed.
I'm repeating your advise, TobiSGD in post # 63

If my assumptions are correct Slackware is not installed. I'll go through the installation process once again in a few min's.

If I don't get the bootloader screen (after I try to install again) to be able to boot into the installed system
than It will be clear to me that I have "missed a step" during the installation process.

This is strange-

Upon restarting and booting from DVD (to attempt to re-install) I have a prompt with my host name and login.
Never had this before. This is new.

In console mode btw-
Is this where the root password is required?

At this point I am not quite sure if Slackware really is the correct distribution for you.
Yes, that is the point where you log in as root. Now follow the documentation to create a new user.

The confusion I see here is that it is difficult to discern whether OP is booting from hard drive or dvd. In the most recent post you say you booted DVD but there is no way your going to get a login screen asking for a not-yet created account such as is on an installation dvd. So in that case you did apparently boot the hdd to the beginning setup commands for Slackware.

The screen to which numerous people have referred, the VERY FIRST stopping point (in like 0.1 seconds!), from the DVD is one with a bootloader command line. It states that the command line is there to add any desired switches to the booting kernel OR as a rescue booter. This is an important feature partly because it is so simple and there is no way to forget commands or syntax since Patrick gives an example, like

This has saved my bacon so many times and so fast it borders on ridiculous, but the reason I display it here is to be clear what the VERY FIRST screen actually IS when booting the Install DVD. Keyboard Layout only shows up AFTER pressing ^CR or "Enter" at the first screen.

I respectfully ask for all the great helpers to try to display a little more courtesy and patience because not all here speak English as a first language, and even among "natives" impersonal text is extremely easy to misunderstand or misconstrue. This is perhaps made some worse by the delays of a forum. It used to be that we used IRC (sigh....BitchX we knew ye well) from commandline when teaching or learning how to setup X, or a soundcard, a new module, etc., back in the day when it was all manual.

Anyway it seems some progress has been made. It looks like you have a booting hard drive install. Please try to be aware of the difference between booting from DVD and HDD, and be specific and thorough in your queries. You're almost Home

I was able create a new user and password.

At present I am still in console mode and this is what my screen says: (I think) I did it right-
I followed Managing Users And Groups
http://www.slackbook.org/beta/#id337145

I have not read "Filesystem Permissions" Chapter 10 yet.

You might be right TobiSGD.
I'll continue over the next 30 min's and see where I get.
If Slackware is not for me I'm thinking I will know that here very shortly-

IT worked!

I have a very nice blue DE!

Thank you very much!

The distro is installed and I have full functionality of the DE.

Hoovering with the wireless mouse over Konqueror, Activity Manager so forth and so on in the Menu bar is working.

I'm looking for /etc/inittab to see if I can edit it.

TobiSGD, One buck, Alien Bob, Smokey justme, Didier Spaier, gengisdave,moisespedro & allend:

I am very greatful and very thankful for all of the time & effort that you put into this thread in helping me.

If I have caused any of you to enter into frustration and or reach a point of aggrevation I am sincerely sorry.
At one point I lost my sense of direction and was experiencing confusion with installing 4 times.

It's very nice to have good help and I appreciate all that you guys assisted me with.
Thank You all very much!

Congratz! Now just to be certain, you're not in X as root are you? One way to be certain and to also give you a selection of DEs (assuming you installed all) is to use KDM (instead of typing "startx", type "kdm") which is called a display manager but for all practical purposes it is a sweet login screen that allows one to choose which User to login, which Desktop Environment to launch (most commonly KDE and XFCE, but Slack comes with several) and menuitems to switch desktop, drop back to console, reboot or shutdown.

Most distros come with one DE and Slack is one of the very few that have many right from the start for you to explore and see what you like.

Slackware was up and running and I don't know what I did but my vaio wouldn't work at all.

This is a busy time for me.
So, I put what I had available (Fedora) on my system, which for right now is my only smart option.

I am going to pursue Slackware again, when the time and opportunity present themselves.

Just wanted everyone who helped to know that their time hasn't been wasted, I'll pick up where I left off with Slackware. Hopefully soon.

In the future I think the best choice would be to purchase the Slackware DVD directly from the Slackware website.

When you say "won't work at all" that's not very revealing. Does it just not go to a bootloader? Does it not even power up?

If I assume it powered up since apparently you put another system back on it, just remember that you could have used that First Page of the Install DVD, the bootloader commandline, and with one line booted Slackware and fixed Lilo, since that is likely why it "wouldn't do anything" :P

My Vaio wouldn't power up at all and when it finally did all I had was a black screen.

I'm glad it's functioning properly now. I thought I ruined/hosed my laptop.

Again for the future I think I should only trust purchasing the Slackware DVD--

Thanks enorbet for the wise councel-

For The Record it is not possible for an operating system (or any software for that matter) to prevent a purely physical power switch from working. The ATX standard changed that somewhat when the "soft on" system was developed. My understanding is that originally even the ATX switch is a simple, dumb, state-change toggle, also not software controlled, although ACPI bioses, and especially newer UEFI, probably put some software hooks in the power switch. I haven't run Modbin in over 5 years so I don't know this in detail.... how bioses may connect.

I seriously doubt that Slackware or any other OpSys could prevent the power switch from activating. What purpose would that serve? My imagination can only come up with some absurd anti-theft device but that would be in BIOS, not the OpSys, IMHO.... or a bad battery connection.