[TYPO3] how to actually work with typo3?

[Benjamin Elijah Griffin]

I've gotten Typo3 version 4.1.1 up and seemingly running, but getting
an actual web page produced with this is maddening.

There are plenty of tutorials, but none seem to match what I see on
the screen (perhaps written against version 3.x?). I can create
a "template" and a "page" but I can't figure out how to assign a
page to a template.

Nor apparently can I put content in a page without a template
assigned.

Some screen shots:

http://www.gracenote.com/private/typo3/

How do I use this thing? What tutorials can tell me exactly
how this works? Why can't the examples in, say, the Modern
Template building tutorial actually work? (I've tried importing
them, and the extensions manager shows them as loading, but
I can't do anything with the files.) It doesn't help that
these things are distributed in a file format I cannot easily
take apart and view the contents of. How does one extract
the parts of a .t3d file? Why does the filelist tool in Typo3
try to display them when I click on them there? My browser
cannot display a .t3d file and just prompts me to save it.

Benjamin