This happened to me when trying out my wordpress locally on XAMPP for windows.
Other functions and plugins seem to be working, but when I activate emo-vote, wordpress(admin and site!) gets like this:
screenshot.
I have gone through the plugin troubleshooting twice except #7. Does this mean something is bad in my configuration?
I think I found my solution by myself. Comparing a working plugin with this non-working showed me that the php-part was missing in every <?php-tag in emo-vote.php.
I'm not very php-knowable, why did the file look like this?
In some setups you can use PHP files with just <? rather than <?php, but it requires PHP's config to have ASP-style tags turned on. XAMPP ships with them off and it's considered pretty bad practice to use ASP-style tags if you're going to distribute something.