How to get any help related to PEAR?

Hello.

I tried to install PEAR but got problems. Tried to find any help but
got Access forbidden! on http://www.pear-forum.org/.
You do not support PEAR project any more?

My problem:
1. I began as written here
http://pear.php.net/manual/ru/installation.getting.php. But I got
absolutely different behaviour than written there. I cannot install PEAR
with your instructions. They do not work.

I use Windows XP. I have XAMPP installed. My path to PHP in XAMPP is
"C:\xampp\php". My path to PEAR dir in XAMPP is "C:\xampp\php\PEAR". In the
dir "C:\xampp\php" there is "go-pear.bat" file. I ran it as written in your
manual but instead of

The setup will ask you some questions and afterwards the PEAR Package
> Manager will be installed


I got only errors like these:

manifest cannot be larger than 100 MB in phar
> "C:\xampp\php\PEAR\go-pear.phar" PHP Warning:
> required-once(phar://go-pear.phar/index.php): failed to open stream: phar
> error: invalid url or non-existent phar "phar://go-pear.phar/index.php"
> in C:\xampp\php\PEAR\go-pear.phar on line 1236
>
> Warning: required-once(phar://go-pear.phar/index.php): failed to open
> stream: phar error: invalid url or non-existent phar
> "phar://go-pear.phar/index.php" in C:\xampp\php\PEAR\go-pear.phar on line
> 1236


You do not provide any info about such kind of mistakes. Reading your
manual there is everything is OK, but it's not OK.

Also it's written in the manual:

> Again: If you are running a recent version of PHP (> 4.3.0) you can skip
> the installation section.


Yes, I have PHP ver 5.03 installed with XAMPP. And as I told above there is
dir "C:\xampp\php\PEAR". And there is some file "go-pear.phar" in that dir.
But I cannot do anything with it written in the manual.

I cannot *access the PEAR Package Manager by running the command pear in a
Windows Command Prompt*, as written in the manual.

Which steps should I undertake now to solve the problem? Where can I get
any help?

Thank you,
Serge