Thanks that was a good tip.  It said I needed to install front page server
extentions.  So I installed them and I was then able to publish my test site
called TestPublish.

I was recently reading documentation on the new project styles in vs2005 and
one of the changes was that a vs2005 web site project (rather than a web app
project) doesn't need front page server extensions installed any more.  this
contradicts the error I received.

does anyone want to comment on that?

now that I succeeded in publishing the site, I get the following error when
attempting to browse the default page.  however,  I'll start a new thread on
this.

Server Error in '/' Application.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom
error settings for this application prevent the details of the application
error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however,
be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable
on remote machines, please create a <customErrors> tag within a "web.config"
configuration file located in the root directory of the current web
application. This <customErrors> tag should then have its "mode" attribute
set to "Off".

<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->

<configuration>
   <system.web>
       <customErrors mode="Off"/>
   </system.web>
</configuration>

Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom
error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's
<customErrors> configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.

<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->

<configuration>
   <system.web>
       <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="mycustompage.htm"/>
   </system.web>
</configuration>