Windows 7 64bitI recently  updated my hardware at the office, and i switched from Win7 32bit to Win7 64bit. Almost everything worked fine in the new environment, other than a small/big problem with the curl library in my PHP/Apache installation.

The configuration was fine - I was pretty sure I followed all the necessary steps to make it works: enable it in php.ini by removing the leading semicolon in "; php_curl.dll", copying libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll in windows/system32 directory (or somewhere else inside the PATH).

 

Nothing. I always got the error:

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'php_curl.dll'
The specified procedure could not be found.
in Unknown on line 0

Nice. I googled around for a while, and almost all the posts I found referred to the two dlls being copied in system32, or unkind post inviting to read the installation instructions for Windows here.

I struggled with a problem for some hour, without any result, until I finally got this page, in German language (by Black Rider - all credits to him). Thanks God there's Google Translator, and I found he solved copying the two dreadful dlls to the Apache bin directory. After doing this, everything worked finally fine and I was able to use curl extension in my PHP installation.

Just for completeness, my PHP/Apache versions, installed on Windows 7 Pro 64bit (english): Apache/2.2.17 (Win32) PHP/5.3.9.

Note: wonder to know why 32bit versions in Win7 64bit? Because the Apache/PHP/MySQL installation in synched with other two machines, and actually both are still 32bit versions of Win7. When all three will be 64bit, I'll switch all my synched installations to 64bit too.