Hi Scott, I'm also relatively new in drupal, so I don't see exactly what's going wrong in your special case, but I might have some hints that hopefully get you further:
* as far as I understood, the garland theme is not especially made to be extended and customized. The Zen theme is made for exactly this, maybe the "basic" theme, also. You might have moire luck working with these?! * This mailing list is not very crowded - it seems you have much better chances to be read and replied to when using drupal.org's website for questions and problem reports. * if you go there and ask for help, you should post the exact error message you are getting, and the code part where you define garland as the base them, you might have a typo somewhere - if inheriting of template.php doesn't work, the whole parent thing seems not to work at all.
Henning