There are a few good articles as to how to install PHP on a Microsoft Windows Vista 64 bit edition. One of which is titled Vista 64 – IIS 7 – PHP x64. However, once installed, you may encounter the ability to access the website via localhost or with 127.0.0.1, however, not via the IP address of the computer.
After alot of troubleshooting, someone posted a comment as a user contributed note to the PHP: Microsoft IIS 7.0 and later – Manual. This was not a resolution only a comment that simply stated the following:
The default installation of Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 adds a line to the Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts which causes network functions (database connect functions too, like mysql_connect) to timeout when connecting to “localhost”. To resolve this problem, remove the entry from the hosts file:
::1 localhostor connect using the IP address, 127.0.0.1 or another domain name.
This behavior change is due to IPv6 being enabled by default in Vista or other recent Windows version.
Now you can use the x64 snapshot builds of 5.3 on these new windows platforms to run a completely up to date 64-bit fastcgi configuration!
From this, I interpreted that there was a possibility that IPv6 could be the culprit to my unresolved problem. First I needed to verify that IPv6 was enabled. It was. Then disabled IPv6. After a computer reboot (which likely was not necessary), I was able to access the website via IP address.
