Been having this problem for about a year, it's extremely frustrating.
When loading any page locally on my computer running XAMPP, about 20% of the time, Chrome (and other browsers) will just sit there with "Connecting..." in the status bar and eventually time out. Sometimes when it happens I have to reload the page like 5 times to get it to connect.
I've tried reinstalling XAMPP, upgrading to newer versions, etc. Cant' seem to figure anything out. I don't know where to start troubleshooting this. The timed-out requests are not appearing in any of the main Apache log files (access.log., error.log, php_errror.log). I'm totally stumped. I don't have this problem on my laptop install of XAMPP.
Any suggestions?