I just thought I’d mention a web server I’ve been testing, Cherokee. It’s a pretty handy webserver, very compact and apparently very fast at serving static files (better than Apache, even). It’s still very much in beta and there is quite a way to go before I’d consider deploying it on a production machine, but from the way things are looking, it has promise. The development team usually hangs around on irc.gimp.net #cherokee — so drop by there if you have a chance to test out Cherokee and have some feedback. The page says that it works under Cygwin as well, which it is supposed to, but the latest releases don’t actually compile on Cygwin, but it’s a known bug and will hopefully get fixed soon.
One of the main attractions of this server is that it can be run as a non-root user and doesn’t need to be installed by a superuser, which is a nice bonus. There is also a Cherokee community on Orkut, so feel free to check that out as well.