Migrating blog posts from wordpress.com issue

Hi

I have recently set up a self hosted blog on wordpress and now want to move my blogposts from my old wordpress.com blog. I have followed various tutorials and to the best of my knowledge have done everything correctly. I am hosting with hostgator, used their quickinstall and set up wordpress. I used the export tool on the old blog to save a file of all the old blog posts. And the import tool on the new blog to move them. However, although I can see all of the images and a txt file for the blog posts in the media library, they don’t show up as posts. The categories and tags I have used previously show up in those folders, but there is nothing in the blog posts.

I have tried this several times including turning off all plugins. But it still won’t work. Any ideas why or what I could do to fix this?

One other point – not sure if this has anything to do with it – when I first downloaded wordpress from hostgator, it said that I should put the URL for the blog with a / myblog in case I didn’t want to have the blog as my primary website. I’m not sure if I want another website at this point so I followed their advice. When I did that, I manage to tranfer all my old blog posts over successfully. However, I then realised that the URL for my blog wouldn’t work unless I typed in /myblog afterwards and I didn’t want that. So I uninstalled the entire thing and started over with just the blog URL (leaving off the /myblog). Since doing that I can’t seem to get the blog posts to show up.

Please help! I’ve spent about 5 days trying to get this to work and am going nuts(am not techy either)

Thanks