Reading around, I saw developers saying all sorts, such as making copies of the XAMPP folder to ensure Vista had the right permissions, or turning Vista’s User Access Control mechanism off, or installing services from the command line and so on and fourth.

But amongst all these suggestions, only 2 things need to be done to get XAMPP (1.6.2 anyway) working on Vista.

First, don’t forget to run setup_xampp.bat in the XAMPP installation folder.

And secondly, you need a file called msvcp71.dll to reside in the root XAMPP folder. I copied this from my old XP Windows/system32 folder, but you might need to get it elsewhere.

If you do these 2 things, XAMPP should fire up no problem.