Installing PHP on a Windows server is a labor of love. Unfortunately, I'm not a great fan of that kind of labor.

As penance for earlier evil deeds (too numerous to mention here), let me share what I've learned so others may learn from my travails.

PHP Version: For various reasons, I needed to install PHP on a Windows 2003 server. The internet is replete with opinions on how best to do. Do it manually. Never do it manually. Use the MSI. Use certain MSIs. I found that I could never get IIS 6.0 to display a web page until I used the 5.2.9 version of the Windows PHP installer. Best guess is that it's a bug, and no one really cares that much about Windows 2003 anymore.

mySQL Install: I've never had problems with mySQL installs before, but due to the afore mentioned PHP issues, I ended up uninstalling mySQL to restart from scratch. When I got the mySQL stage, it wouldn't complete the last step (starting the service). Since that step worked without a problem the first time, I was perplexed for quite a while. Finally, a single blog post mentioned that mySQL dropped a competing config file in "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\mySQL" that uninstalling didn't remove. Deleting that and re-installing made everything better. Now there are two posts.

GD/ImageMagick: I'm installing MediaWiki to run on this server, and once I got past the other two problems, I got a message that it couldn't find a graphics library. I'd installed GD from the MSI and enabled it in PHP.ini, but PHP was never able to load the php_gd2.dll file in my extensions folder even though it was plainly there. Another bug. So I tried ImageMagick, the more complex but better alternative. After much searching, I found that most modern install methods didn't support my version of PHP, but there was some mention of people having success downloading an older version of the PECL library (5.2.6) using the included "php_imagick.dll" file as the extension. I spent quite a while finding a copy of this old library. Turns out that only the versions compiled before June 2008 had the DLL. And it didn't load either. Sigh. Looks like we don't get thumbnails.

I set this up on another 2003 server a couple years back and didn't have near this level of problem. Hopefully, PHP works better on 2008.