I spent about 3 hours trying to figure out how to install PEAR and furthermore, PEAR packages.. here's how i figured it out
So i learned a valuable lesson today realizing how many bugs are in PEAR, and I hope none of you have to deal with the crap I just dealt with, so I'm going to share some advice..
I'm not a command prompt guy, but I found it extremely easy once I realized that most of my issues were arising because I was:
1) not logged in as an administrator
and
2) not running cmd.exe as an administrator (right click over cmd.exe and choose "run as administrator"
Once I got past this, most of the suggestions I was finding online as how to manage PEAR packages became very simple.