First of all, Lady Fitzgerald, please don't call yourself an idiot. These things can be finicky as all get out, and often people give instructions here assuming a certain amount of shorthand knowledge.
So asking a second and third time is a sign of persistence and intelligence, not deficiency.
As it happens, I can't get the thing to work with Freda on my PDA, and I'm hoping someone might be able to help with that. Here's what I did:
In Calibre, I turned on the Content Server, and I tested it with the test button. A-okay.
In Freda, I went to the screen that asks for such things and entered the following address:
http://[computer]:8080/
where [computer] is the name of my computer on the home network. No luck. I tried again, this time in place of the computer name using the numeric address that I saw in my browser when I used the Test button. (I'm not sure if that's the actual network address for my computer on the home network.) As a different sort of test, I connected with Freda to the built-in address for Feedbooks, and that worked fine.
I tried the same things again, after turning off the firewall on the computer, and also the AV protection. No luck.
Turned security back on.
So...what's the secret handshake? I remember it took forever to get it to work on my wife's iTouch with Stanza, but of course I've forgotten what made it work in the end.