After having tried repeatedly to install Drupal 6.9 against Apache + mod_php + postgresql (assuming that I should get with the program and run it on its native platform instead of Quercus/Tomcat), then falling back to 6.8, then losing all hope when even 6.2 still hung on “Initializing.” despite all my efforts (and countless rebuilds of PHP), I finally decided I should probably give it one last try directly served by Apache as opposed to in a reverse proxy configuration.

And the install worked off the bat.

So if you are struggling to install Drupal and are about to give up in disgust, make sure you are not in a reverse proxy configuration. Why this doesn’t actually work I have no idea. I don’t see reverse proxy options in the administrative settings, so I’m not sure how/whether I should configure them even though I see them in the config file.