Did battle for 2 hours this am. Did a clean install of XAMPP on my Windows7 computer and walked through a ruby install. Apache would not start. I believe when I copied the code to add in httpd.conf into notepad++, I got slanting quotes. When I edited the quotes, they went back in as straight up and down. That was my stupid problem, just saying.
Details:
I ran the apache_start.bat file to see what was going on. I kept getting the error that line 520 which had to do with documentroot, was not a directory. I put ..htdocs/project01/public, which existed.
I thought maybe the permissions were wrong. Spent an hour in DOS (remember the attrib command), the changed UAC and still got the same error. Then I noticed that one of the quotes in the Ruby section at the bottom was slanted and the other was straight. When I deleted that and added another quote, it appeared straight up and down.
Used the bat file to start apache. Then it gave me an error on line 521 the Directory. Changed the quote on that and apache started. And I got the opening html page in Ruby.
I suspect if I had sudo or used the Windows Notepad editor and made sure I saved it as a MS-DOS text file, all would have been fine. Copying and pasting caused my issue.