I had asked back on Wed May 31 13:25:55 UTC 2006 about this problem: [quote] I am running mediawiki as a localhost setup for development/learning. The environment is XAMPP (so, Apache, MySQL, PhP, etc.) in WinXP. Everything is going well ... except for "uploads". I have read this, and everything else I can find on enabling uploads. For some reason I keep getting this error message: "The upload directory ($/images) is not writable by the webserver." [/quote] Sy Ali replied suggesting I hard-code the path, which didn't work but got me thinking. I posted the solution on the mwuser's forum, but thought I should note it here, too. In LocalSettings.php, you remove the "$/" from the $wgUploadDirectory setting, so it reads: $wgUploadDirectory = "images"; and then the uploads work fine in WinXP+WAMPP setup ... at least for me! :) David.