Drupal showing blank page after migrating to a local server (this question has been asked on Stackoverflow so I apologise for the repitition)

Firstly some background,..

IVe started a new job as PHP developer with a company that hosts 2 Drupal (6.x) sites.

While I have years of experience in PHP, Drupal ( and indeed off the shelf content management systems in general ) is a new one on me. Still, there is loads of documentation and its not rocket science, so no problems there. 

The server environment is IIS (live server 7.0, locally 7.5) IIS is a totally new beast to me too, so it adds to teh learning curve.

I have successfully gotten a clean install of Drupal (7.x) to run locally, so I know the server is up and running correctly

The problem happens when I try to pull down the live site. I have replicated the database locally, and I know that it is connecting, however when I try to run the local site I get a blank page with the following source c ode: 

&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"&gt; 
&lt;html lang="en"&gt; 
  &lt;head&gt; 
    &lt;?include '_inc_head_common.tpl.php';?&gt; 
  &lt;/head&gt; 

  &lt;body id="body"&gt; 

      &lt;?include '_inc_header.tpl.php';?&gt; 
      &lt;?include '_inc_content_3col.tpl.php';?&gt; 
      &lt;?include '_inc_footer.tpl.php';?&gt; 
  &lt;/body&gt; 
&lt;/html&gt; 


So it seems that it is getting to a point and no further.. 

has anyone encountered this before or could someone point me in the direction that I should be looking at?

Thanks

Kevin
Seems like you are using PHP shorthand. Can you change it to a proper  and see if that helps? Please see if the path is correct since drupal is using relative path (base_url, base_path). Also please update the $base_url in the settings.php if you have.