Description:
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v5.5 executables does not run on Windows XP, specifically, I have tried on XP SP3 x86, with all the latest patches applied and VC11 redistributables installed. I just downloaded the precompiled binaries 'php-5.5.1-Win32-VC11-x86.zip', unpacked the zip-file and tried 'php -h' in a terminal. It shows an error pop-up:

  "php.exe is not a valid Win32 application."

and a message "Access denied." in the terminal.

No web server nor a database engine of any kind is running on the machine, just running the precompiled executable with '-h' parameter leads to the described result.

Precompiled binaries from 'php-5.3.27-Win32-VC9-x86.zip' run well on my setup (shows a help text, no error pop-up).

Frankly, I am not a Windows developer, but after googling a minute I got a faith that this could be easily fixed. This is a fragment of discussion on stackoverflow:

Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 has now been released, and adds official support for running apps built with VC++ 2012 on Windows XP.

So I propose compiling php v5.5 binaries capable of running on Windows XP systems and putting them in download section alongside currently available ones. I believe that there is still a tremendous number of users runinng Windows XP.

Thank you very much in advance.