by Paul L.
Thanks, that was the issue.
We installed a non thread safe version of php that didnt have the intl.dll . We later downloaded php again to get the missing dll after seeing moodle requirement for it but downloaded the thread safe version by mistake.
I needed the icu*.dll files for this to work too fyi, placed them in my php directory.
For those of you comparing dll's dont forget to look at the time stamp as well as date, we glanced at the date and they were the same!
thread safe dll properties
8/15/2012 9:17
119kb
non thread safe version
8/15/2012 8:01
116kb