Installing AMFPHP to Windows 7

I was excited to read about the release of AMFPHP 1.9 in February, but I didn't need to install it until a couple of weeks ago, when I was working on refactoring my Lazy Loading Tree example to take advantage of Maté. I wound up burning up almost an entire day due to permission problems on AMFPHP that were difficult to track down.

It turns out that something about my setup, whether it's Windows 7 or IE 8, caused a problem with the zip file when I downloaded it. The first thing I needed to do was to go into the properties of the zip file and hit the "Unblock" button. I had no idea that the "blocked" setting on a zip file could affect what are, in effect, text files inside.

But even after I did that, I had problems with the AMFPHP files that were in subdirectories, and no matter how I changed security settings on it, I couldn't find anything that would work. It seems that somehow Windows was encrypting the folders as they were being extracted. When I extracted them on a thumb drive, it couldn't apply the encryption. When I copied those extracted files over to my WAMP installation, AMFPHP worked perfectly.

Hope this helps someone avoid blowing out a day on this.