Bruce_M_Whealton on "Local Installation problems"

Hello all,
I have installed Wordpress many, many times. I'm doing this on my Windows 8 machine. Unfortunately, I'm running into issues with the local server, I am using. Actually, with various servers I've tried. Up until recently, I never had these problems. I have tried wamp, xampp, and some Bitnami stacks. Usually, you can just create the database and it will accept the root username. That didn't work. So, I tried to create a user and database with the same name. I picked a very simple password for my development machine... to be sure that I could eliminate any variables that will cause things to go wrong. Anyway, in the last setup, I have db and username the same and access is from localhost and from anywhere.
I keep getting an error that it cannot select the database or that the database connection cannot be made.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance for any help,
Bruce