A: 

Are you sure you are running a MS SQL server? As far as I am aware, the XAMPP packages comes with a MySQL server. Try and use mysqli_connect() with the same parameters.

bigstylee
A: 

Can you show us how you used mssql_connect?

Btw, I would use the PHP driver offered by Microsoft to allow PHP to connect Microsoft SQL Server.

Abs
A: 
Jim
A: 

After wiresharking the network connection, I find that PHP is trying to connect to the SQL Server on port 4000 instead of 1433.

Jim