Ah! Thank you. I'm gonna guess, then, that this is a problem particular to XAMPP and/or Windows
FWIW: I'm running my local dev MediaWiki instance on Apache 2.4 and Windows XP. I reinstalled everything about 2 months ago, and don't recall doing anything extraordinary to get it to work
Here is some copy-paste Info
Apache Version Apache/2.4.3 (Win32) PHP/5.4.11 Apache API Version 20120211
From Special:Version
MediaWiki 1.21wmf11 (3fbc368) PHP 5.4.11 (apache2handler) MySQL 5.1.58-community Lua 5.1.4
Hope this helps.