Install to localhost

I've been trying out most, if not all, of the suggestions.  I may be getting closer to the problem, and would welcome some further thoughts.

I re-installed mysql, wampserver etc., and I was still getting no where. I uninstalled it all, and then installed Xampp (along with the variable setting info provided), and then CI. This seemed to work okay. I could display the welcome page for xampp, and ci, and I like xampp much better too.
I imported the database from the live site through phpmyadmin, and created a temporary user so I could test the connection. I then loaded the site in, and gave it a whirl. It now just sits for minutes and then fails, with no errors. So, I used a small php file to test a database connection and it fails, after quite some time, but displays an error.  If I put in an invalid connection it fails quickly, but if I use localhost:122, which is my server for this, it spins for quite some time.   I can use a url like - http://localhost:122/phpmyadmin/ or http://localhost:122/ci/ , so I thought the connection would be localhost:122 also.

Also, I enabled all of the logging, as suggested too but still nothing much shows up in the error log unless I do something wrong on purpose in some code and run it. The php_mssql.dll error is gone, but I am getting some sort of warning now "[ssl:warn] [pid 1644:tid 344] AH01909: www.example.com:443:0 server certificate does NOT include an ID which matches the server name"

It looks like it is nothing to do with CI (or at least I'm not that far yet) and a connection problem or something related along those lines?

Code:

<?php
$link = mysql_connect('localhost:122','nairb','nairb');
if (!$link) {
    die('Could not connect to MySQL: ' . mysql_error());
}
echo 'Connection OK'; mysql_close($link);
?>

And the error from the above:

    Warning: mysql_connect(): MySQL server has gone away in C:\xampp\htdocs\testmysql.php on line 2

    Warning: mysql_connect(): Error while reading greeting packet. PID=8108 in C:\xampp\htdocs\testmysql.php on line 2

    Warning: mysql_connect(): MySQL server has gone away in C:\xampp\htdocs\testmysql.php on line 2

    Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in C:\xampp\htdocs\testmysql.php on line 2

Sorry for the long post, but trying to get whatever information or thoughts out there.  Any more ideas or thoughts are quite welcome!