Been working on this for roughly 8 hours now. Install goes fine. I can get into admin, everything is permissioned out correctly, i "false"ed the mod_rewrite, manually ftped some images, no matter what, none of the index.php's display anything. tried drilling down to the theme index.phps but still nothing.
Hosting on linux, gd is there, al should be well

I would have attached my post here first If I had seen it... having same issue as posted here http://www.zenphoto.org/support/topic.php?id=908#post-4822

I also included the error messages from my server logs.

If you're case is the same as slidenby's then check your PHP include path, there may be conflicting names there and warnings that aren't being displayed (for that you might want to enable show warnings, or warning level, or whatever that is, so you get some info).