Trying to understand how to interact with IE forms

I have went down this road serveral times.  There are times where I need to use autoit to interact with IE windows and forms, and I never have gotten it to work, and have always either abandonded it or went another route.

I have looked at the IE example form serveral times and to me, it just doesnt quite simulate the complexity of an actual web form. 

I did find a couple more examples and ran them, with no success.

Here is the latest one I tried.

#include <IE.au3>

$oIE = _IECreate("http://www.autoitscript.com")
Local $oForms = _IEFormGetCollection($oIE)
MsgBox(0, "Forms Info", "There are " & @extended & " forms on this page")
For $oForm In $oForms
    MsgBox(0, "Form Info", $oForm.name)
Next

 

This output doesnt make any sense.

So here is my question.  In order to target forms on websites, what exactly do you need?  There are IE Objects, and then there are IE Form Elements (from what I gather)

Can someone explain the differences and perhaps offer up a snippet that would explain it a bit clearer?

thanks