XMPP 1.7.3 installed status

[Twayne]

Hi,

I just replaced XAMPP 1.66a with 1.7.3 and have what appears to be setup problems. The hash numbers are OK for the download and nothign seems corrupted. Sort of an FYI, my own "history" says that I usually miss something ver basic, even though I get along fine with the more complex parts once I get going<g>.
The really strange thing is, I can remove 1.7.3, reinstall 1.6.6a, and all will work fine! But as soon as I remove 1.6.6 and reinstall 1.7.3, all the problems return. I don't know Apache or the overalls enough to be able to TS much more than I've described here, so need some experienced help I guess. Also, I'm not afraid of registry tweaking.

PROBLEM:
I cannot get the server to accept and serve a program written in PHP (or HTML, though I didn't fiddle a LOT with HTML). I've used a file named phpinfo.php to run the phpinfo() tests, just to keep the php file simple. <?php phpinfo() ?>

From the Control Panel, I can open the phpinfo no problem and it says success w/r to XAMP's status. From the Control Panel, I can use ALL of it features and demo programs, and they all work fine. ALL statuses in the control panel indicate "success" and never a problem shows up.

ENVIRONMENT:
-- XP SP3+, AV & several antispywares can find nothing wrong. 2.8 GHz, 4 Gig RAM, all kinds of disk space, no known issues with the OS or HW.
-- Apache and SQL are running.
-- Both are running as Services.
-- using http://localhost/ in a browser grings up the expected screen with the message:
"XAMPP 1.7.3!
Congratulations:
You have successfully installed XAMPP on this system!..."

I have not yet created any folders under htdocs other than long enough to see if a php files in that directory made any difference; it didn't.
-- But, ...localhost/phpinfo.php, ...phpindex.php or ...phpindex.html ALL fail!
-- In IE8 all I get is a display of the script's code.
-- In FF 3.6, I get EITHER a blank screen, OR the last line of the index.php file that says there is something wrong with the XAMPP installation, which would seem to imply it's working, but running any other file simply gets a blank screen.

REPAIR ATTEMPTS:
-- Scrutinized settings,
-- reinstalled XAMP 1.7.3,
-- checkde the Control Panel's Admin buttons for Apache and SQL,
-- checked and recheked ports vs firewalls; all OK.
-- Noticed that localhost accesses seem to be pretty slow compared to the old version 1/6/6a
-- Cold booted the computer,
and whatever else I could think of.

All comments and suggestions would me most appreciated!

Thanks in advance for any/all assitance you may provide. I notice a lot of similar but not the same posts here so I may well have to just go back to version 1.6.6a.
Does 1.7.3 conatin many valuable features in your opinion?

[MC10]

I think it's because they're in xampp\htdocs\xampp, not just xampp\htdocs. Add \xampp to the URL and try again.

[Twayne]

I think it's because they're in xampp\htdocs\xampp, not just xampp\htdocs. Add \xampp to the URL and try again.

No, they're in the correct directory: C:\xampp\htdocs\phpinfo.php.
I did get an error message this morning; apparently you only get it once though because I can't make it happen again, even after restarting FireFox. It was something to the effect that FF didn't know what to do with the file because somethings wasn't associated. Successive tries only got the blank screen I was getting yesterday.
It didn't say file association though, so it's not that, but some sort of association made within FF's settings I'm guessing. And IE8 still just shows me the code instead of running the program, which I think means the same thing.

Any other thoughts? Anyone?

Thanks