Having installed the XAMPP on your winXP machine followed by Movable Type you may come across the following issue:
The Movable Type Perl files look for the Perl interpreter located here:
#!”C:\Program Files\xampp\perl\bin\perl.exe”
Replace following line in all the MT cgi files
“c:/Program Files/xampp/htdocs/your_blog_directory”
Movable type will not accept spaces in the Local Site Url to change the “Program Files” to “PROGRA~1″.
“PROGRA~1″ is the short name for “Program Files”, useful for software that does not accept names with spaces.
Viola!