Configuring Tor, Vidalia and Tor Button

For the past 24+ hours, I have been trying to get Tor, Vidalia and the Tor Button to work and stay working. I say this because, for the brief span of a few hours, I not only had an anonymous IP address, but a random one as well. Shortly thereafter, I started experiencing problems. I checked my log files and it would say something to the effect of not being able to bind 127.0.0.1 to port 9050. I have read the manual over and over and I still cannot get it to work nor do I understand how/what to fix.

Can anyone here help me figure out how to set up tor, vidalia and the tor button to work and keep working? I am running Debian "Squeeze."

Update: when I

su apt-get install polipo, the following occurs:

Setting up polipo (1.0.4.1-1.1) ...

Starting polipo: Couldn't open config file /etc/polipo/config: 2.

invoke-rc.d: initscript polipo, action "start" failed.

dpkg: error processing polipo (--configure):

subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1

configured to not write apport reports

Errors were encountered while processing:

polipo

E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

How do I resolve this error?

Update to the update: I solved the error by creating the missing file in /etc/polipo/config. apt-get remove was then able to remove it