Question

I had a problem starting WAMP and XAMPP on my PC running Windows Vista. Perhaps because I also program in Microsoft Visual Studio and use IIS 7, localhost (also used by WAMP and XAMP) was not available and a couple of processes blocked the launch of the WAMP and XAMP servers.

I found multiple solutions but they only worked partially.
I combined a few and came up with the solution below.

Answer 1

I created two bat files (just use notepad and save as .bat):

startApache.bat:

net stop MsDepSvc
net stop W3SVC
net start wampapache

and stopApache.bat:

net stop wampapache
net start MsDepSvc
net start W3SVC

use startApache.bat before you launch your WAMP of XAMPP server and stopApache.bat after (or before you want to use IIS7 again)