Having worked with WordPress for some years now, I have found the installation pretty fool proof and set up straight forward.
That is until we installed two new blogs on Titan servers. WP could not set the permission for uploaded images.
This was due the way their Apache server was set up. When the month changed, WP could only set the images’ permissions as 640 rather than the 644 that is the norm. The only way we could ensure that we had trouble free uploads was to disable the change of month facility. Hardly ideal, but it means that the sites work as they should.

The problem, however, has totally foxed the technical people at Titan and, of course, they put the blame on WordPress. Interestingly every other WP blog we have installed on various servers have worked out of the box.

Moral in the story? If you are experiecing problems with your WordPress install – it may not be you, it may just be how your server is configured.