This is an old thread, but I found it at the top of Google results, so I thought it worth responding as I had exactly this problem today and none of the fixes I found online seemed to work.
My installation of Xampp on Windows 7 went fine, I managed to login to the admin area for wordpress at
http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin.php without any trouble, but when I went to
http://localhost/wordpress/index.php was redirected to the /xampp/ folder.
I checked the setup against a working installation of Wordpress on another server and found that during installation the /wordpress/index.php file had been removed from the /wordpress directory and placed in the /htdocs directory and renamed index_2.php. There was a new index file in the /wordpress folder that was doing the redirection to /xampp.
Al I had to do to get Wordpress to work properly was to rename index.php in the /wordpress folder to "index.something-else", then copy the "index_2.php" file from the /htdocs folder to the /wordpress folder and rename it index.php.
I hope this might help others who get stuck with this problem.