I've read over lots of the forum posts and have tried multiple solutions to no avail so I'm here asking for some help. I've installed XAMPP so I can "easily" modify Wordpress themes (according to Adobe's website) before putting them on my live server but this "easy" version isn't working out to be so easy at the moment.
I've gone through the install directions several times to make sure I installed XAMPP correctly (I've completely uninstalled the software in between installations and rebooted my computer each time to ensure there were no lingering corrupted files messing with the installations) but I cannot get the http://localhost to pull up. I've followed JonB's guide and read over his FAQ's but I keep getting a "HTTP Error 404. The requested resource is not found" when I try to pull up the localhost in my browser window.
I was able to determine part of the problem was getting Apache to start so I managed to fix this (changed the Apache config file so it points to port 8080 instead of 80) and Apache seems to be consistently running. (Side note: Appache is running on two ports with two different PIDs so I'm not sure if this is normal or what.) MySQL appears to be running without a problem.
This is the last entry on my Appache error log: [Thu Sep 22 15:43:09 2011] [notice] Child 1304: Starting thread to listen on port 8080.
I've checked my host file and it has the correct ip address: 127.0.0.1 localhost
I've got Microsoft SQL Server as well as IIS 7.0 installed on my computer but I have no idea what they do or why they are there as I don't recall installing them or ever using either of them. Since I didn't know how they interact with the rest of my computer programs, I thought changing the Apache Config file to point to a different port would be the safer course since it's just a matter of changing three lines in the file. Could this be the problem?
I'm running a 64bit Dell with Windows 7.
I'm desperate for some help and would appreciate anyone's assistance on this. Thanks so much!