XAMPP

[eluser]danmontgomery[/eluser]
[quote author="nZac" date="1275429916"]So really you are getting some flavor of Apache, still Apache, but tweaked based on how the people that compiled the package thought would be easiest.[/quote]

This is exactly right...

This thread is confusing... You've never said what your actual problem is, and even said at one point that it was working. You also seem to be confusing virtual hosts and virtual machines, which are not remotely the same thing. (And neither would affect the ability to remove index.php from URLs)

If you're still unable to remove index.php from your URLs, and you'd like some help, maybe you should post some details on what isn't working, what you've tried, error messages, etc.