Comment: I get a blank page when trying to access setup.php

Cindyrod, everytime I have seen the 'white page syndroma' it was because a failure of the PHP run time. The issue is to find which function call causes this failure. According to your description, the faulty call is probably in setup.php or in shared/global.php. Maybe you could add some echo 'here' and echo 'there' in the code to better locate the function that is not supported by your PHP engine.

The comparison with phpMyAdmin is fair, YACS has not been tuned against so many systems that phpMyAdmin. i am not sure that phpMyAdmin performs so many tests before the installation either.