First of all, no one should demand or possibly even expect an eventual solution-bringer to their question. Every answer is written by someone doing it by their free will, so even a great community can't guarantee complete "customer" satisfaction.
If it's been a few days since the question was asked with a little input from others, I would expect it to become never answered on next to any volunteer-based support area.
Generally questions, which
- are well formed;
- are specific;
- show research effort by e.g. providing links to materials you have gone through to confirm they don't apply to your case, or further excluding information; and
- don't require significant post-editing/detailing,
tend to become answered more likely. I'm sorry to bring it up, but your question didn't match to any of these.
An exact search by a search-engine for the error brings thousands of results. This is a yellow flag for a too inaccurate error description. I would imagine one can answer to the question exactly only if she has faced the exact issue earlier and happens to see your question. And, after all, SharePoint provides extremely detailed logs which should record any errors and give further details about the issue.
Also I'd like to point that the question in its current form is still a bit unclear for me, as you say
I just installed MOSS 2007 with the latest service pack on Windows 2008 R2 SP 1.
and the actual question-line is
Do I need to install Windows 2008?
To learn more about asking a question, you should read the related Help-documentation about asking.
To get to your questions on this meta question, you are pointing on something which is true, but also explainable.
The community is not run by scripted answer-bots that look up the Try-my-luck-google-result, so don't worry about that! It's actually very likely, that many of the 30+ people who opened your question tried to look up for an answer without hitting any. Each view is the opposite of ignorance, so you are not a victim of such.
When a user who attempts to help you doesn't get back to you, it's more or less the sign of "I'm sorry, I don't think I can help you any further". Now this could be said aloud, but the comment area is not exactly meant for that (see When should I comment?).
To wash my hands, I got to say that the many users of SP.SE or any SE who provide answers (or even comments) are extremely willing to help. There just are and will be questions which we can't provide sufficient answers.
What kind of saddens me, is that if a community member like you thinks
I came here for help and I am not getting any.
although you have received a personally written answer attempting to help you within 9 minutes since the question was asked.