Apache and PHP just won't work

Yesterday I had a setup with Apache 2 and PHP that was allowing me to use sessions and GD but would give me errors for about half the extensions (you know, the it can''t be found error because they couldn''t make meaningful errors). I really needed SQL and XSLT to work and so I uninstalled. I proceeded to install PHPDev, the newest version. Never got to configuring sessions; it still couldn''t load half of the extensions, and actually, it got worse as it couldn''t load GD. So now I can use nothing that I need besides the built in XML stuff. I system restored and tried starting my old apache and it won''t start. Nothing appended to the error log. Nothing. So does anyone have any ideas? Or links to predone packages that actually work since I''m sick of configuring this by hand?