MySQL not working from PHP

[Greg512]

OK, I've been using xampp for a while now just to work on learning PHP and that has been great. However, I'm having some trouble working with MySQL. (I'm running on Vista)

When I go to the windows command prompt and access xampp/mysql/bin/ I am able to run MySQL and I can create databases and edit or erase them. So MySQL itself seems to be working OK. But when I try to write PHP code to interact with the databases I get nothing. The page loads up totally blank. The phpmyadmin isn't working, either. It says, "Cannot start session without errors, please check errors given in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly."

I've only been learning this stuff for about a month so I really don't know where to start. Any suggestions for how to start figuring this issue out?

- Greg