There’s a lot of people out there that are going to need to run WAMP server on Windows 7. I am one of then! I’ve recently upgraded to a new PC running Windows 7 64-bit, and I needed to run WAMP to keep my testing environment working properly.
There’s a lot of people that have this problem. You install WAMP, start it up, and it doesn’t run. Well, it runs, but the WAMP icon in the taskbar shows as red (no services running) colour or yellow (not all services running). What happens here, is that Apache is being ‘blocked’ from using port 80 to serve it’s web documents by another process. But what other process? Before Windows 7, the main culprit for this has been Skype. This runs on port 80 normally so that it can avoid any problems with non-standard ports being blocked by your ISP. Users could over-ride this, and this solved the problem.
Windows 7 intorduces a issue with this. The service that is stopping Apache is ‘World Wide Web Publishing Service’. This is a Microsoft application that lets you do very quick-easy-and-nasty web publishing. Not that it’s bad, but it’s not something that will ever give you a professional website.
To get around this you need to disable this application. When you do this, Apache will start properly, and you’ll be able to run your local testing server.