OK. I finally found a combination that works. After MUCH trial and error, I was finally able to get the below combination to work on my machine. Hopefully it works for anyone else who might be struggling with this.
- OS: Windows 7 64 Bit
- PHP: 5.5.6
- XAMPP: 1.8.3
- Compiler: MSVC11
- Architecture: x86
- ImageMagick: ImageMagick-6.7.7-5-Q16-windows-dll (available here)
- Imagick DLL: PHP5.5.x version from http://www.peewit.fr/imagick/
Note: Once I tried this, Apache started without any error messages. I did not have to restart my computer (just restarted Apache). I do have ImageMagick installed in a directory that has no spaces in the name (as some have suggested that might be a problem with some installs). In my case, I installed it to c:\xampp\imagemagick.
Best of luck to you!