I suggest just getting Technic then, it's as simple as running the launcher, and you can disable most of the mods that you don't want.
Yeah I failed that too T_T I will try again...
It's pretty easy to mod minecraft, just remove/rename your existing .minecraft folder (located in C:\Documents and Settings\"username"\Application Data\.minecraft on windows xp), then launch minecraft.exe to let it re-download the whole thing (it's pretty fast),close it, get Risugami's ModLoader, Forge -you can find links for those two on mods forum page and maybe this thread OP- and whatever mods you want that are compatible (for instance right now on this install i have minecraft 1.2.5 and Equivalent Exchange + Buildcraft + Thaumcraft).
Then it's just a matter of opening \.minecraft\bin\minecraft.jar and
deleting the "meta-inf" folder, then dumping
first the contents of the Risugami's ModLoader.zip in the jar,
then the same with Forge, and then you check your various mods, most of them will require you to simply put the downloaded
unextracted .zip/.rar/.jar in the .minecraft\mods folder -which you can create yourself if it's not there.
If i look at my mods, i can see that Equivalent Exchange requires to be extracted and the two folder inside (\mods and \resources) directly dumped in the .minecraft folder, while the Thaumcraft .zip needs to be dumped in the \mods folder, and same with all the buildcraft .zips ; the mod comes in several parts so that you can install only the ones that you want (or all of them in my case).
Once all of this is done you should be able to launch minecraft.exe again and play with your mods no problem.