Yesterday I've installed XAMPP-1.5.0 on WinXP Home and I have to say; it went like a breeze. This is one of the easiest and fully featured packages there is. Switching to php4 was also very easy.
I hit just one minor snag: I could not get url rewriting with Drupal to work.
I managed to get it working by moving the line
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
from its location to just below
LoadModule autoindex_color_module modules/mod_autoindex_color.so
Apparantly something in the load order is throwing mod_rewrite off, but right now I've got no idea what/which mod.