No no no no no!
Do NOT change the web root in httpd.conf, you don’t need to, and it can sometimes cause problems with XAMPP, if you need the web root else where, Sym links is the way to go (but thats a topic for another day, I’ll keep things simple for this)
Another thing to mention (doesn’t apply if you used the installable version) you’ll need to the the setup.bat or whatever it’s called as XAMPP isn’t in a top level directory (why do you have xampp/xampp?)
Now onto the fun stuff
1) Put everything back to how it was, so the web root is back to htdocs, delete all the contents of that for now (if you’ve done any work, move it somewhere else for now)
2) Extract CI into the web root, so you now have C:\xampp\xampp\htdocs\CodeIgniter_1.7.1
3) You can change the CI structure at this point if you want (eg I move the core out of the web root, move the application folder and index.php into a project folder in the root with a short, descriptive name). I’ll assume you’re leaving the default layout for the time being
4) Open up Eclipse (you can delete the old projects there as they’re no longer valid)
5) Create a new project, give it a new name and then select “Create project from existing source”. Browse to the CI folder in you’re web root and select that
6) You can finish now, as the rest of project setup is irrelevant (unless you changed the structure and need to link the application to the core, in which case I recommend creating the core project first)
7) That’s it, you should not have index.php and the config, controllers etc folders at the top level of your project, and the site is visible at http://localhost
Is that clear enough?