nthali

found the information on the wow company page: https://wow-estore.com/docs/create-home-page-with-categories/

Thank you sir. i took the easy way out (your second suggestion) and stuck the index.php in the DirectoryIndex directive within the httpd.conf.
Looking good now.
Much appreciated.
best,
nilesh

yup. it’s the entire 2.9.2 zip file extracted, so it has the index.php. anything that i might be missing at the apache level?

Being a “king of pain” i installed all components myself, so i’m not familiar with how the database and the user got created when you used xampplite, but here’s what gave me the same error using phpMyAdmin:
when i added the new user, i left the “Host” field at “any”. this
made me unable to login to the wordpress db using host “localhost”.
i deleted the user, then recreated it this time switching the value for “Host” to “local” at which point it correctly used localhost.
hoping for a swift resolution to your issue.
best,
Nilesh