recently installed xampp1.7.7 on new windows7 computer. Built a Joomla site on local host. Just one of many. tranfered the site to a live host. made backup. tranferred the backup to localhost. Tons of errors. Discovered there seem to be problems and the only solution I could find was to go back in xampp versions until the problems (404, 500) errors disappeared. Bottomline:
Seems that something has happened within php. backups of joomla site fails to re-install AFTER php 5.2