This long story ends happily, ladies and gentlemen. I appear to have put things back to normal, and I'm glad to say it did not require a reinstall of my OS nor a switch to running Apache, PHP, and MySQL as indivindually installed components.
First let me say that the problem was NOT the prefetch files nor the backup zip file as noted in the previous post.
So let me wrap it all up by first restating the problem in simple terms, and then giving the steps to repairing the problem.
THE INITIAL PROBLEM:
Basically, I had a version of xampp that was a few versions too old. I wrongfully decided to try and run a second (new) version in an external drive (via USB) without removing the former. However, you can't do that; you can only have one instance of xampp daemons serving a single machine (or something like that). Windows got very, very confused; it didn't know which install to be functioning with, the subshell got misdirected, and as a result Windows could not locate (communicate) with the MySQL database (it couldn't even find phpMyAdmin). The real problem sign to look for when running
msql_start.bat from the command prompt is
"Cannont find php cli!". Complete removal and reinstallations of xampp would not fix the problem, and as you can see from this long thread, even Wiedmann was stumped.
I should point out that I did not want to run xampp as a service, but perhaps if I had to begin with this would not be the long ordeal it turned out to be. On to the remedy.
THE REMEDY:
1. Create .sql dump files of your databases for safe keeping.
2. If you had been using Virtual Host Containers that worked, copy the text for those from your http-conf file and save in a text file for reuse later.
3. Completely uninstall xampp (all copies) from your machine (and any connected external drive).
4. Do a system search for "xampp" to see if any xampp-related registry files are hanging around. (I didn't have any.) If you find any, back up your registry first (
do it), and
then delete the files you find.
5. As noted in the previous post, I found some prefetch files from the old installs at c:\WINDOWS\Prefetch. Might as well delete those too if you have them.
6. Install a new version of xampp in the root drive (c:\), and do the MD5 check to make sure it's good. (I used the 7-zip executable.)
7. Open a command prompt, change directory to root (c:\), and run the following command:
xampp\services.exe (I believe this was the magic step that really put things right by reestablishing the proper path to the xampp subshell, or whatever.)
8. However you prefer to do it, open the xampp Control Panel, then click the
Settings button. In the path you should see
C:\xampp\services.exe. (If you want to run xampp as a service, go ahead and click the appropriate box, but I didn't have to do that to get things working.) Click OK.
9. In the main Control Panel view, you should now be able to start/stop your xampp modules normally (i.e., apache, mysql, etc.). Start them for both
Apache and
MySQL.
10. Open a Web browser and go to
http://localhost. You should see the xampp start page.
11. Click the phpMyAdmin link in the left column. Drumroll please... You should see phpMyAdmin open successfully instead of some good-mood-killing error message.
That's it. From there it's back to configuring xampp as you normally would, setting up your databases, etc.
If this makes it into the wiki (and I hope AF starts an English branch of the wiki for Pete's sake), then it would be nice to give credit for the fix to Destry Wion at
wion.com and Lou Quillio at
on2.
Thanks, and goodnight.