OneAndOneIs2

So, being quite busy on the web developing front these days, I have a WAMP stack installed on my desktop machine.

(On my laptop as well, but that's not important at this point.)

So that's Windows XP, Apache 2.2.13, MySql 5.something and PHP 5.2.10 - all fairly stable, established releases.

But I started having little problems here and there. A website that worked fine on its host was broken locally. Weird little glitches. that I couldn't quite fix.

But hey, different hosts, different software versions, they can all make these things happen. I didn't worry much.

Then I got this book on PHP that I'm trying to work through. Unlike the stuff I've been using so far, it doesn't use mysql_ commands - it uses the next-gen mysqli_ ones. And they didn't work when I tried them here - PHP didn't understand mysqli

Which was odd, because it had the dll...

Long story short, I looked into apache's logs and saw some error messages. Five dll's weren't loading, one of them being the mysqli one.

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\\php\\ext\\php_mysqli.dll' - The specified procedure could not be found.\r\n in Unknown on line 0

Problem identified.

But they were in the same extension directory as over 40 other dll files, all of which were found and working flawlessly. The half-dozen files that it was apparently unable to find were sitting right there, alongside dozens of others that it was loading without complaint.

I tried everything. Google. Forums. Reinstalls of PHP and Apache. Tinkering with the config files. Frequently my attempts to fix things broke them so badly that I had to spend hours undoing the effects of the fix just so I could get things back to their original broken-but-mostly-working state.

It was doing my head in. There was no reason for it. It was looking in the right place for files that were there. And failing to find them. Even telling Apache directly to load the dll itself just error'd out.

Finally, however, I have found the problem!

I came across a helpful bit of software called Dependency Walker and pointed *it* at the files in question.

And what do you know... the dll's that were causing all the trouble depended on *other* dll's that weren't there.

Or were present but broken. Registry issues.

...did I ever mention that somebody else was using this PC before me, and installed a *mountain* of crap on it? In the course of clearing up the damn thing when I started using it, not only did I uninstall more than half the applications on board, but I cleared sixteen gigs of files out of the download folder, dating back several years.

So I finally had the solution. Broken registry and missing dlls were preventing the dll's I had from running, so Apache was unable to load them, so was throwing up error messages.

So I downloaded the missing dll files and ran a few registry cleans and rebooted a few times, and now, at last, after all my hard work...

...Windows is so badly broken that it can't get online and throws up error messages even on bootup.

So I've plugged in my USB hard drive and backed up all the files I need, and I'm thinking that tomorrow, I'll see about installing a clean copy of XP. Then I'll reinstall the rest of the WAMP stack and all my other files, and at THAT point, I should at last have a fully-working machine again.

This is progress, dammit!!!