I tried several 5.x versions, both exe and zip type installs into c:\UniServer and could not get apanel to come up. I got Forbidden 403 error on http://localhost/apanel but other test pages I put in were served up just fine. No other webservers running. This was a relatively plain XP SP2 installation. I tried the same vers 5.6.7 on a Win7 and another XP machine and they both run apanel just fine. Checked ports 80 and 3306 available before starting, then started the server and saw 80 and 3306 active. Tried editing .htaccess as described to no avail. I needed a clue. The breakthrough came when I added the line Options +FollowSymLinks to the bottom of .htaccess in home\admin\www. This tells Apache to follow symbolic links. ie. http://localhost/apanel actually points to C:\UniServer\home\admin\www which is NOT in the usual c:\UniSever\www directory. This enabled apanel to run without the forbidden 403 message. Whew - it took an entire afternoon to fix this one.
