hmm c5 worked for me out of the box (almost) just had to enable php short tags

When you say "enable php short tags" what did you mean>

I am getting this same error, I have tried increasing the

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Resource Limits ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

max_execution_time = 120 ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
max_input_time = 120 ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data
memory_limit = 64M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (16MB)

Also short tags set to off.

You could also check the settings in php.ini of my xampp server herehttp://pastie.org/923000

The Xampp server I am using has Php 5.2.9

I have been able to upgrade 5.3 to 5.4 sucessfully but have no success with doing a fresh install of 5.4

try this:

memory_limit -1
post_max_size -1
max_input_time -1
max_execution_time -1

@Mnkras : I tried changing the values as suggested by you and now instead of the Fatal error , now it kept giving me validation errors, even though i kept filling the right email id, server name, mysql dbname, username and password.

Also, it wouldn't let me create any new db in phpmyadmin. This was happening on Xampp ver.1.7.1. I tried upgrading the xampp server to the current ver.1.7.3 and now C5 5.4 installs properly.

Thank you for your help.

Cheers !!