I’m one of those read-manual-when-anything-else-fails people, cause usually manual are so bid yet meaningless and seldom provide information that I need.
I am a fan of good references and Installing SharePoint Services 3.0 in a Sandbox Environment is one.
There’s one hiccup I’ve had while using it – I did use local service accounts while my test machine was in domain, it result in SharePoint not resolving domain accounts correctly. Reinstalling WSS with domain service accounts resolved the problem :).
Another nice post about installing SPS.
http://blogs.msdn.com/emberger/archive/2009/04/17/automating-wss-v3-moss-2007-development-environment-setup-synthesis.aspx