Okay, I got it working. Here’s what I think the problem was – installing the wordpress directory underneath the xampplite/htdocs dirs INSTEAD of the xampp/htdocs dirs. Also, this might have played a part in the fix, but I stopped and restarted both apache and mysql, and also blew away and recreated the wordpress database, selecting utf8-generic instead of utf8-unicode. Shouldn’t have made a difference, but I include it here for anyone else pounding their head.