Apache Friends Support Forum

When i go to phpmyadmin in my browser, I get this Access Denied page:

Welcome to phpMyAdmin

Error

MySQL said: Documentation
#2002 - No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.

The server is not responding (or the local server's socket is not correctly configured).
Connection for controluser as defined in your configuration failed.

How can I get phpMyAdmin to show up properly? Any ideas would be highly appreciated.

edit: I don't know what happened but localhost/phpmyadmin started working... (127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin still doesn't.) I didn't reboot my computer or make edits to php.ini or my.ini
Still, I'd love to hear why it might not've worked before

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I am using Windows Vista SP2 64-bit.
I just downloaded XAMPP 1.8 today, and ran that; Installed both Apache and Mysql as services.

According to the control panel, Apache (80,443) and Mysql (3306) are both running.
Both of these give me the same error:
- localhost/phpmyadmin
- 127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin/

I am quite sure that mysql is working. CD collection works.

The only line uncommented in my hosts file is:
127.0.0.1 localhost

In my.ini, I uncommented this bit:
bind-address="127.0.0.1"

I'm not sure if there's anything to edit in php.ini, but this is what's set for sockets. I made no edits:
pdo_mysql.default_socket = "MySQL"
mysql.default_socket = "MySQL"
mysqli.default_socket = "MySQL"

Apache HTTP Server and mysqld are both exceptions that are enabled in my Windows Firewall.