Hello everyone,
I've been dealing with this issue and just have worked around it ... but, it's an issue ... and I have simply given up on resolving it. I've searched here, Google, StackOverflow/Serverfault - nothing definitive.
I don't even want to say how much time I've thrown at it. But ... I have similarly configured systems I currently use and have used in the past. This type of issue has never happened for me.
When I start up Apache in XAMPP - it takes forever for the Apache initialization. It looks almost like Apache is checking every single port during the startup process.
I've tried many different techniques - including removing all of my hosts entries (OS) AND vhost (Apache) entries on this one. I sadly haven't kept track of every try to fix this issue.
This is what startup looks like:
It takes about 5 minutes for Apache to do whatever it's doing ... then everything goes normal - with the "Apache" bar going green, then 80,443 listed as ports. This is on a 7th gen i7 system/16gb ram. I don't think it's a system performance issue.
I have debugging / error logging on high in the Apache config. I also have virtualization enabled ... but network switches are all disabled.