For what it's worth:
We recently deployed a new moodle server for one of our K12 partners in the state, by default we use moodle on apachefriends in a Linux environment the current revision of AF has issues with the LIBXML2 parsing HTML in Moodle.. Luckily we did not have any "real" data on the server yet.
for all using this method of deployment the ApacheFriends 1.6,8a works, the 1.7.2 DOES NOT.. I will watch for 1.73 when it is released from Beta. I played with the beta yesterday and ran into an issue. I believe KAI of AF is working on the BETA 1.7.3 as near as I can tell it does have the 2.7.6 LIBXML2 included. I will wait for the RC to be released before doing an upgrade.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/files/