yeah... the Status page is a little flaky, imo. It admits that it may or may not accurately reflect the actual status of the various components, and has been that way for some time. It'd be nice if it got fixed, but since I'm not up to coding it myself I try not to gripe *too* loud...
So... like I said, make sure that the basic install of XAMPP is running okay first, before you worry about Joomla. (I have no experience w/ Joomla and I'm not taking a trip down that rabbit hole at this time to help ya, sorry). It sounds like you can access XAMPP from the localhost (the machine you installed it on), which is a good start.
On the left-hand menu, there should be a link that says 'phpinfo()'; click on that to see if your php installation is working properly.
I would strongly suggest you click on the Security link (should open a new window) and take the basic steps outlined there. All it really does is have you assign some basic passwords and stuff. I'd also suggest writing them down, and/or saving them to the .txt files as offered on the screen to prevent having to re-install XAMPP. Don't ask me how I know that...
Once you have the security stuff taken care of, you need to restart Apache and MySQL to have the settings take effect. Open up the web browser same as before (may need a username/password if you set one up above) and make sure you can still get to the user interface.
You might want to take a second to look at the sample applications shown on the left side menu such as the CD Collection, etc. These are samples to show you a bit of the capabilities of your XAMPP installation.
Now that you have the basic XAMPP install working from the local machine, you may want to try accessing it from another machine on the network (if thats something you need). To do that you'll either need to open a port (80) in your firewall (or shut it down entirely for the time being) for http. If you're content to just work from the local machine for now, thats probably best.
If you go to the XAMPP docs page on their website here:
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/faq-xampp.html and go to the very bottom of the page, there is a pretty good basic tutorial on getting things working together. It's a couple years old, but covers most of the basics (including some of the stuff we've already discussed here).
I know it seems like a bunch of junk unrelated to your main goal of getting joomla up and running... but if you are 'not a computer guy', then you better plan on spending a little time getting familiar with how things work before installing a CMS and getting totally in over your head. It'll make it a little easier later on to be able to tell what is running as it should, and what isn't.
HTH,
Monte