Lone ranger's workbench

Just did a Force.com Workbench installation on XAMPP on Windows XP (!)  It went pretty smoothly.  XAMPP version 1.8-VC9 with Workbench 24.0.  The only glitch was with PHP SOAP client, as discussed here, about SSL support in the client.  The cure mentioned worked like a charm (I only had to uncomment php_openssl.dll).