Thank you. I apologize for not getting back sooner.
The solution was to add "host=localhost", which did not exist in the download config file but did in the sample file. The reason I did not see this change solve my issue at the time was that IE9 continued to display the error from cache instead of reloading the corrected version.
Two lessons come out of this:
New users need to add the "host=" parameter to the XAMPP phpMyAdmin config file.
IE9 (probably all IE and perhaps Firefox, etc.) need to have set options parameter 'new versions of sorted pages' to "every time I visit