I do hope you’ve already gotten help, but for other people who might stumble across this, here’s what to do.

1) Put up a .htaccess that blocks access from any IP other than yours
2) Turn on PHP error reporting to E_ALL | E_NOTICE
3) Take a look at the errors that get mentioned. They’ll very likely tell you what’s wrong.
4) Set error reporting back to what it used to be
5) Take the restriction out of your .htaccess

On the chance that you’re trying again with the recent 3.0 release and getting the same problem, lemme know; I’ll be watching more carefully for a week.

Sorry I missed you.

– John

I can see that the post has been created some time ago but I hope that one of you would be kind enough to help me.

I have this very problem actually. I am trying to set up wordpress (WordPress 2.9.2) locally thanks to easyphp (EasyPHP 5.3.1). I m running on Vista. The process stops here http://127.0.0.1/wp-admin/setup-config.php?step=2 and the page is blank. I am not a professional. But I hope that I could fix that by myself.

Any idea ? Thanks a lot.

Ari
Do you have any advice ?

1) It’s hitting some aborting error, and your webserver is configured to be paranoid and to not say anything in those situations (which is a good thing). In those cases, look at your webserver logs (if you’re on a cPanel/Plesk site, you can get to them from your control panel; otherwise use locate to find httpd.log or apache.log most commonly) to get an idea of what’s wrong.

1a) Common causes are missing modules such as gd or mysql, wrong directory permissions, etc.

2) You’re running out of RAM. This isn’t so common with word press; WP isn’t an insanely hungry app. Even so, just try pumping your allocation limit up (remember to restart your webserver to make the change take effect) to see if it changes things.

3) One of your plugins or your theme don’t like the new Word Press. Briefly, turn all your plugins off, and set your theme back to default, just to test. (If the control panel also won’t come up, it’s probably not this, but still testable: add a ‘Z’ onto the end of the wp-plugins and wp-themes’ directories’ names. It won’t break anything, though it’ll look awful briefly.)

4) You have a partially uploaded file. This most commonly happens when you’re trying to work over modest quality wireless, but some shared webhosts so badly overburden their servers (cough M2O cough) that FTP connections are occasionally just dropped. If neither #1, #2 nor #3 turn up success, try re-uploading everything, just for the sake of it.

If none of those four help, c’mon back, and we’ll keep going from there.