All we can do is to make troubleshooting suggestions one at a time and hope, as you did, people try and solve it from interpreting these suggestions, well done.
I am pleased that it is now working and you have had some insight into the inner workings of XAMPP.
Thanks for the feedback.
Good luck and best wishes.
but let's see how it goes. My next obstacle is probably creating a fresh blank database, user/pass, and configuring magento to find it. But I'm going to need some food for that, and I expect I can find the answers here or in the manual if I have trouble. This forum seems quite active based on the number of posts!