by Steve Kleine.
I've posted this up before, so it should be familiar to some people...
The XAMPP install for Windows is utterly useless for its stated purpose. We fought valiantly for weeks to get Apache's httpd daemon to stabilize without success, finally performing an emergency data migration to an IIS7 installation of Moodle. The combined download is here and we've had nothing but joy since.
Save your sanity and, if you're on the Windows platform, use the IIS version.