Just wanted to add my 2 pence contribution to this brilliant project by explaining how I solved this exact problem!
In short: BLAME SKYPE (for me atleast).
You can start skype after Apache is running, but not before... if you start it before, it hogs the ports needed and you get error %%1 when trying to start the server.
Use Port-Check to make sure your ports are free from such programs then try starting apache again.
Hope this helps atleast one other person out, in which case it was worth posting