Today when I started up phpMyAdmin (version 2.10.0.2) by going to http://localhost/phpMyAdmin I saw this error screen.

I googled around but could not find any solutions.

So I went and tried to install the latest version of phpMyAdmin, 2.11.5. When I tried to run setup I saw this error screen.

Now that I had an error message to work with I googled around and found this post, Xampp phpMyAdmin Problem, which helped me diagnose the problem.

It turns out during one of my cleaning sessions I wiped out the session directory in, “C:\DOCUME~1\fkim\LOCALS~1\Temp\php\session.” After restoring it I ran into my next problem.

I upgraded to PHP 5.2.5 from 5.2.1 but that did not help. I installed the mbstring module but that did not help.

Finally I added the PHP extension directory to the path (I had already added the PHP directory to the path) and it finally worked! My path now includes the following two directories, E:\Program Files\PHP and E:\Program Files\PHP\ext.

After installing MySQL 4.1 I was unable to connect to the MySQL database via PHP. It turns out this was because I set the root password. I tried instructing MySQL to use the old password encryption method by adding these two lines to my.ini but that did not work.

#Use old password encryption method (needed for 4.0 and older clients).
old_passwords

Finally I just uninstalled MySQL 4.1 and reinstalled it without the root password. After doing that everything was fine.

Also I noticed when I uninstalled MySQL 4.0 it did not remove the service. When I installed MySQL 4.1 it complained about the Windows service”MySQL” already being there so I had to install the Windows service “MySQL41”. Then I uninstalled MySQL 4.1 due to the above issue and it removed the “MySQL41” service.

When I installed the second time it thought I was trying to reconfigure the “MySQL” service. I instructed the installer to remove the “MySQL” service. Then I uninstalled and reinstalled a third time and this time I was able to install the Windows service “MySQL41” properly.