IDE Debug Help

Help. I pretty much wasted the weekend away trying to get an IDE (any IDE) and debugger (any debugger that works) setup for my local Drupal dev environment.

Tried Eclipse (even bought a PackT ebook on the subject) in many forms... PDT, PHPEclipse, others. Tried a couple debug options like Zend, xdebug. The IDEs work to some extent but I really need debugging and have failed on every attempt in that regard. Even tried CodeLobster (very briefly) and NetBeans. Can't get debugging to work in any of these systems. But I think I'm close on several counts.

My dev environment...