Did you try, on command line, either "mysql" or "mysql -uadmin -p"? Also sometimes Windows shows a service as "started" doesn't necessarily mean it actually started successfully. I would try starting mysql manually from command line.

Thanks everybody for the kind suggestions, especially Dean Wette who emailed me alerting me that my spam filter is rejecting legitimate comments.

I'm using Pebble's spam filter listeners, including the "delete rejected" listener. So I didn't even know that someone has commented and that the comment has been rejected. I turned that off today and saved the two comments from the rejected pile.

As for my original problem, it's all MySQL's fault. It turns out that my original installation was never successfully completed. In the last step of the configuration wizard, it saved the settings into my.ini, it started the server, but failed to save the security setting. The reason? Access is denied for 'root'@'localhost'.

I copied the error message and pasted it into Google. Several MySQL hosted pages were found. So I'm not alone in having this problem. However all the suggestions posted by others (as well as the two comments here, and Dean's email suggestion, and another reader's email suggestion) did not work for me.

Someone even filed a bug report in MySQL's public bug database, which engenderd a response from MySQL that states essentially "this is a bug database, not a support forum."

So I'm stumped. And I'll give up MySQL for a while.

Thanks for your persistence in your attempts to circumwent a spam filtering system gone awry.