I think what you describe in your first paragraph was remedied by the EQ Server Installation Pack. I started to download this as per.. I believe... the wikis instructions for setting up a 7.0 server. However, upon realizing that it was going to set everything up for me, I immediately cancelled that download and, so, remain completely ignorant of what that actually does. XD
However, what you're wanting is an Installer and not necessarily a GUI for the server. Like I stated, I *Believe* (could very well be wrong) that we have an installer. As far as them setting up a lot of the things ahead of time, it turned out when I finally figured out where the hell the config file was, that almost everything HAD already been configured for me. In fact, I'd just like to state that in their efforts to make the setup more user friendly for everyone, they actually somehow made the process even more difficult for me. (Maybe others, too???)
And, btw, the emulator CAN be used for a LAN, although I'm not sure that it's available in this version of the emulator. Back in 6.0 and 6.1, I ran a LAN party at a friend's house roughly every two weeks. We had between 4 and 14 computers every time and then we had one set off being the server. Really was a ton of fun. As for the part about you logging in by yourself--- you can either lock the server (you should be able to still get in if you have a status high enough on your account) or you can change a few settings to only point to local ip address in your config and it'll make it LAN only (you'll need Minilogin if you do this).
Since you can't really do anything with the zone.exe and world.exe windows (that I know of), a GUI for these would just be a lot of unnecessary overhead, but, if the installer for these isn't already out, then I agree that it would be a good idea for a lot of less technical and/or newer users.
Sorry if I've misunderstood you in this post or my last, but it sounds like you're wanting two different things. =/ One of which isn't necessary and the other which I thought we already had. =(
-Sarepean
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