For a few weeks now I could not start up XAMPP. And I just could not figure out why. I thought it must have been all the crapware that I’ve installed on my notebook over the months. So, probably a clean reformat will fix the problem.

Luckily I did a quick Google search and it turns out others have faced this problem and the cause of it is Skype. Turning off Skype from my Windows status bar fixed the problem. XAMPP, Apache and MySQL all launched without problem.

If you want to run both Skype and Xampp at the same time, it’s possible.

Just disable Skype’s usage of port 80 (also needed by Apache webserver).

1. Go to Skype’s main menu Tools->Option->Advanced -> Connection
2. Uncheck the "Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections".

After that, starting up Xampp is no problem