WampServer

I was pulling my hair out--not a good thing with as sparse as it is already--trying to figure out why Apache seemed to stop responding as soon as I made any change to httpd.conf or httpd-vhosts.conf, and even after restoring the backups of the pristine installed versions and restarting all. I uninstalled and reinstalled at least twice, encountering additional problems,* and still couldn't get it to respond except immediately after installing and starting up initially.

I finally realized that the "Server Offline" caption was there by default when WampServer2 started from the install. Apparently having the server "online" takes it "offline," for all practical purposes, because it refuses to respond at all. I won't make that mistake again!

* One of the additional problems is that of phantom directories that are either owned by ??????? in group ?????? and/or set to read-only but not responding to unchecking (in Explorer, same as ATTRIB for all practical purposes) and clicking Apply. Or in a cygwin mv command, telling me Apache is still running after an uninstall!

BTW, the problems following '*' are most likely due to the flakiness of Windows and/or its fragile and ill-conceived registry.