@aberry
Troubleshooting your issue may be quite time consuming and entail many routes.
This is just a stab in the dark but do you have a firewall or a virus scanner, like Symantec's Norton etc., issue here.
Have you set Windows firewall or ZoneAlarm etc. as these can give issues.
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/faq-xam ... html#xpsp2
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/faq-xam ... ml#nostart
Try to
temporarily disable your firewall and virus scanner then test again.
Also do you have another web server running, perhaps as a service, or another instance of PHP running (the favoured issue here) because the page
"It works" is the standard index.html page, as you pointed out, from the htdocs folder in XAMPP - XAMPP will give a php based Welcome page when all is working correctly but not if Apache is not running it's own instance of PHP.
Stop any other instances of PHP that may be installed by other programs and are accessing via the system path variable - Eclipse perhaps, there may be a php.ini file in the Windows folder that may be a clue, as Apache in XAMPP uses the php.ini file in the
apache\bin folder - try renaming any other php.ini files you find, other than those in the
.\xampp tree, to php.ini.bak for example, then try again after restarting your XAMPP Apache server.
Find out what is on the ports that XAMPP uses by double clicking on
.\xampp\xampp-portcheck.exe
They should all be
free...
...but first you would need to stop all XAMPP components by using the stop bat files including running the stop services bat files - Using the bat files eliminates any possible issues with the XAMPP Control Panel.
.\xampp\apache_stop.bat
.\xampp\mysql_stop.bat
.\xampp\apache\apache_uninstallservice_2.2.bat
.\xampp\mysql\mysql_uninstallservice.bat
Tip - using the
.\xampp\apache_start.bat file instead of the XAMPP Control Panel will give some good clues if the XAMPP instance of Apache is having problems starting.
So in conclusion, it really does seem to point to a rogue instance of PHP that is preventing the XAMPP instance of PHP from being used.