My instinct here because you have changed things beyond my knowledge (I'm a joomla/moodle person myself) is to get everything fresh and copy over the changes one by one to see when you lose your visual of wordpress.
1) Stop existing xampp and just rename the folder like "xampp-original" (don't delete this)
2) Download xampp 5.6.8 straight from
https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html3) Extract xampp to C:\xampp -> run xampp and make sure it works as is
4) Download the latest version of wordpress and extract it to htdocs -> make sure it works with xampp without changes (besides setup)
5) slowly make changes to this as you did with version 1 but don't do too many changes without checking if it breaks your wordpress site and then you can reverse these changes (hopefully remembering what you changed)
I know this is not a direct solution but as I can't see any visuals, I find myself struggling to help as I don't know the buttons you talk about.