Acquia Drupal for Windows
I needed to setup a localhost Drupal development environment to upgrade a Drupal 6 theme and do some testing prior to upgrading a live site to Drupal 7. I decided to give the Microsoft Web Platform Installer a try on my Windows 8 computer.
While installing Acquia Drupal with Web Platform Installer 4.0, at some point the Web Platform Installer asks for MySQL ‘root’ user password. Further along during the install, I received an error and was prompted again for the MySQL ‘root’ password. This error would not go away even after entering the correct password:
The specified password for user account ‘root’ is not valid, or failed to connect to the database server.
To resolve this issue, Launch the Windows Registry Editor and delete the mysql_pwd registry key under, HKCU\Software\Microsoft\WebPlatformInstaller
Download and install MySQL Connector/Net (32 bit).
I restarted Web Platform Installer, searched for Drupal, and this time I left the save ‘root’ password option un-checked during the install.