Recently we were asked to have a look at a XAMPP installation on a Windows 10 Professional machine which would not start while giving the following error:
Problem detected! Port 80 in use by "Unable to open process" with PID 4! Apache WILL NOT start without the configured ports free! You need to uninstall/disable/reconfigure the blocking application or reconfigure Apache and the Control Panel to listen on a different port
The culprit of this problem was a module of the IIS (Internet Information Services for Windows Server) that is named World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW service or W3SVC service). Apparently, the W3SVC was hoarding port 80 even though IIS was not executing. To provide a quick solution, we decided to stop the W3SVC and get over this difficulty in a jiffy.
As you can see in the following video, to stop the World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW service or W3SVC service) we performed the next steps:
- Clicked on the
Startbutton - Typed in the word
services, which showed theServiceslink which we clicked to start the windows services manager - Then, we scrolled down in the Services window until we found the
World Wide Web Publishing Service - Finally, we right clicked on it and selected
Stop.
After that, XAMPP was able to start Apache on port 80 with no issues.
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Thanks for sharing the solution for port problem.