I'm trying to upgrade my XAMPP from 1.7.3 to 1.7.4 (xampp-win32-1.7.4-VC6-installer.exe). I had already backed up the htdocs & mysql/data folders. I uninstalled XAMPP & deleted the remaining content (to avoid the incomplete uninstall problem I had earlier). I then installed XAMPP 1.7.4. Everything worked fine. I'm able to add new user with all privileges granted. But when I copied the backed-up folders to their respective places, I can no longer grant privileges to new users. I get this error message:
ERROR 1045: Access denied for user: 'root@localhost' (Using password: NO)
I had tried many solutions that the web can offer, including resetting the password, but nothing seems to work. In fact, after resetting the password, and other modifications I tried related to that, I get "Cannot connect: invalid settings" error message when accessing phpmyadmin, the server rejected the connection.
This happened after I copied the backed-up mysql/data/mysql folder. Specifically, I think it's the user.* files from that folder that trigger the problem. But if I didn't copy those files or revert them with the original files, my backed-up users cannot be accessed in that I get "Error establishing a database connection" when opening my site, but I can create new user and grant it privileges again.
What is in the user.* files that's causing the problem? And how can I fix this?
UPDATE :
Further research shows that the 1.7.4 version is actually very VERY buggy... http://www.apachefriends.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=44327
So the question now is: Is it worth upgrading?
I think I'm convinced that version 1.7.4 is just not stable enough and would take reverting back to 1.7.3 as the solution... (see link in my update section in the question)