Bit of a novice here but to setup pear you run the go-pear.bat - i think that the right name - and then you run a reg file that is created which sets up some system wide paths i think you can then from the windows command line run --> etc..... which all worked fine with xampp.

I am now on a clean OS install and haven't installed xampp yet but i thought i might and was wondering about using pear with both phped and xampp can it work with both seperately.

It would be like having 2 seperate pear packages installed, i would imagine there would be conflicts with default paths and such as you have to register environmental variables in windows i think... which would mean that you couldn't have a default path for both xampp and phped, well in my thinking anyway.

If you have XAMPP, I see no reason for you to use php distributed with PhpED. You may want to switch to XAMPP. To make this process easier, we developed Project Settings Wizard. It will help you set project settings and check debugger.