Confused newcomer - please help or point me to simple help

[m_s]

I came across XAMPP this morning, after failing to install freestanding versions of PHP, MySQL and Apache. XAMPP seems excellent, and installs smoothly. But when I try to go to localhost, nothing at all happens – blank page.

Could this be a HOSTS file issue, but it seems that something is locking my HOSTS file and I don’t know how toi find out what program it is. When I run Hostsman, which I use as HOSTS editor, everything is greyed-out and I can’t change anything.

Also, a program called pv.exe tries to start up and something is blocking it – again, I don’t know what, and I don’t know how to find out.

I have read the manual, and I’m getting nowhere. Please can somebody talk me through this slowly, being kind to an aparently slow-witted newb?

More on my setup: I’m running XP, with various security programs running, so I know one of these is likely to be the culprit. I have the following running realtime protection: Outpost firewall, TrojanHunter, Online Armor, Ghost Security Suite.

Thanks!

[m_s]

Over at DonationCoder, someone suggested pv.exe might be closing itself down because it’s misconfigured, but there’s no sign of that in the logs – seems to be working alright. I have shut down all my security progs one by one, but nothing makes it work.

Oh, that’s very interesting: I just discovered that file://localhost/ does display a list of my drives, but http does nothing… Anyone know what’s going on?
—-

So a bit more info: when I formerly tried to open .php files, I got junk – meaningful junk, but not what I was meant to see, I don’t think. Now when I drag .php files into my browser, or navigate to them via file://localhost/etc I am asked if I want to download or open the file. If I choose open, I then get a message (in Opera) ‘Could not start application’. So it this some kind of problem with my PHP install?

[jsdev]

assume you installed xampp to c:/xampp
check if the file php5.ini exists in c:/xampp/php and it has the line
engine = On

check if the file
c:/xampp/apache/bin/php.ini exists and it has the same line
( i am not sure which of the two causes PHP to run in XAmpp, but one of them definitely does)

also,
restart apache using c:/xampp/xampp-control.exe and see what happens (stop and start - wait for about 10 seconds after each - stop and start)

your webserver is not set up properly so is PHP under Apache