Apache Friends Support Forum

Hi guys, I'm back again,trying to reestablish my local system. In the last few weeks, (that's right, weeks), I've been back and forth trying to get some version of xampp to work. I've run xampp for years but - I'm rambling. The 1.8.1 would be great if I could get it configured. I finally got 1.7.4 and before starting it, I went through the issues that are predominately discussed. Then I turned that beauty on, clicked the old 127.0.0.1 and created a database and table. When I then clicked on the control panel - it's already running, but what's running? I clicked on apache.bat & mysql.bat and when I clicked xampp.bat the result was : "can't find apache\logs\http.pid and can't
find mysql\data\mysql.pid. I thank you in advance for any help you may provide.
I have documented my progress ?