Try to access the security page of XAMPP (http://localhost/security/) and if you get an Access Forbidden Error then here is a simple solution to get rid of the error message
+ Go to xampp\apache\conf\extra
+ Edit httpd-xampp.conf
+ Change the line
Allow from localhost
to
Allow from 127.0.0.1
+ Save & restart XAMPP server
+ Try http://localhost/security/ again and good luck

Tried your fix – does not work. Have been wrestling with this problem for 8 days now. Xampp worked fine on my Vista OS until I upgraded to the latest Xampp. Tried resetting passwords, etc but am now of the opinion that there is a residual command / permission causing the problem OR (my belief) that there is a minor but impotant bug in the upgrade package. Will keep on trying. Incidentally, uninstalling everything and then reinstalling on a clean disk still repeats the problem. Ironically, everything else appears to work fine – working it with OSCommerce2.2.
pmcvw
Sorry that didn’t help, i’m running xampp on windows server 2003 with latest xampp, and things are fine, not yet tested on Vista