Problems with Installation on localhost with XAMPP

I found lots of folks (like myself) had issues with a clean install on a windows machine with XAMPP. I spent an embarrassing amount of errors trying to fix this. I’m using a WIN8 machine; MySQL Database on local host.

../wp-admin/install.php just hangs. Little to no feedback on what’s wrong.

One hint: modify the following line in wp-config.php
define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true);
This will generate error feedback from the XAMPP server. In my case, the error messages generated indicated that we were definitely not connecting to the database.

Solution, really stupid solution, to the issue.

/** MySQL hostname */
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘127.0.0.1’);

Use ‘127.0.0.1’ instead of ‘localhost’ yup, it was that stupid. Not sure why. Doesn’t matter, its fixed now.

Info shared for anybody else who gets stuck here. –Zip