Configuring TeX Live 2004 installation on Windows in 5 steps
Staszek Wawrykiewicz (staw at gust.org.pl, 13.02.2005)

This document tries to describe in short the most important steps how to
configure TeX Live 2004, installed on Windows using TLPM program by Pawe{\l}
Jackowski (or by hand, by some bold people).

1. After installation from the TeX Live "inst" CD-ROM, the most important
   thing is to set some environment variables. How to do that depends on
   the Windows version used, e.g., for Windows 9x it is enough to add
   the following lines into c:\autoexec.bat file and restart the system

REM addapt the next line to YOUR TLroot directory 
set TLroot=c:\TeXLive
set PATH=%TLroot%;%PATH%
set TEXMFCNF=%TLroot%\texmf-var\web2c
set PERL5LIB=%TLroot%\xemtex\perl\lib;%TLroot%\xemtex\perl\site\lib
set GS_LIB=%TLroot%\xemtex\gslib;%TLroot%\xemtex\gsfonts

For Windows NT/2K/XP the procedure is somehow less straightforward.
Click left on Start->Settings->Control Panel. Now the window with the 
control panel icons opens. Double click on "System". The
"System Properties" window opens. Click on the tab "Environment"
or look for a button named "Environment Variables" among the
dialog boxes. Now you can change the environment variables for your
user account (or system wide variables when you have administrator rights 
on your machine).
Hint: Having opened this file in any text editor (like Notepad) you can 
copy-paste the variable names and their values from the above example. 
Please adapt first TLroot value to the directory when you installed 
TeX Live.
Windows NT/2K/XP also need setting for some reasons one more variable 
TEXMFTEMP=%TLroot%\temp
Do not forget making such subdirectory by hand!

2. As we need texmf-var directory for (some) configuration files, formats, 
   etc., this is good time to preparing that right now. Please apply the
   following batch (should work on all Windows):

--- mktexvar.bat --<-- cut here
REM addapt the following line to the absolute directory
cd %TLroot%
md texmf-var
cd texmf-var
md web2c
copy ..\texmf\web2c\texmf.cnf web2c\*.*
copy ..\texmf\web2c\fmtutil.cnf web2c\*.*
attrib -R web2c\texmf.cnf
attrib -R web2c\fmtutil.cnf
md tex
cd tex
md generic
cd generic
md config
cd config
copy ..\..\..\..\texmf\tex\generic\config\language.dat .
attrib -R language.dat
echo PLEASE CHANGE texmf-var\tex\generic\config\language.dat
echo (percent out not needed hyphenation patterns)

Now you can edit the file language.dat in the texmf-var subtree
and unsellect all hyphenation patterns which are not needed (and in fact
could be missing).

3. run from the command line:
mktexlsr

4. run from the command line:
updmap

5. run from the command line:
fmtutil --byfmt=latex 
(or any needed format)

More information how to configure the installation can be found
in the TeX Live documentation, see section "Personal configurations"
and also "Tips and tricks for Win32".