bohica61

If you’re using WordPress locally with Windows 7/Apache/MySQL and getting a blank hanging screen on install, the problem may be due to using “localhost” as the host name.

I had the same problem — very frustrating, because there’s no feedback at all for a problem, no error messages, logs not showing anything unusual, no way to figure out what’s going on.

So I put my programmer hat on, wrote some test PHP code and did some digging. Apparently there’s a bug in Windows 7 that causes MySQL connection requests to time out when using “localhost” as a host name. (details here — also affects Vista.)

So here’s how I finally got the install to work:

• Edit the file C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. Note: You will need to run your editor with admin privileges.
• Select a new host name (e.g. “myserver”) and add a new line to your hosts file:
  127.0.0.1 myserver
• In your wp-config.php file (or when prompted running install.php with the sample config) use “myserver” as your host name.
• After installing, access your blog using http://myserver/

There’s another benefit to using a custom server name in the hosts file: if you, like me, want to work on multiple websites locally, you can use Apache’s named virtual host capability by adding a new name to the Windows hosts file and using the VirtualHost directive in the Apache httpd.conf file. Now you can have a second test blog on your local machine (e.g. http://angrycustomer/). Repeat as necessary.

To anyone reading this: Please reply if this fixes your problem. I’d like to know my effort helped someone else out there. WordPress is too good to let isolated problems like this stop you from using it.