I have the same problem (and seemingly the same setup) as Jono. My Wins Xp Pro machine is connected to a hardware firewall/router, and I'm having trouble connecting to
http://localhost/
When I try to start the apache_start.bat file, I get a brief glimpse of a DOS window which suddenly disappears. It's not visible long enough to see what it says.
I installed Xampp using the Windows installer, and as far as I can see, everything installed correctly.
I can see the file:///C:/xampp/xampp/install/start.html page when it loads up, but accessing the
http://localhost/xampp/lang.php?en page results in a "The page cannot be found" error.
As someone suggested in another thread, I have opened a CMD window and tested the syntax with:
D:\xampp\xampp\apache\bin>apache -t
which gives "Syntax OK"
But it seems that an apache\httpd.conf file which I should have, has not been created at some point. I'm assuming that's where my problems lie.
Thanks in advance for your help.