Don't use "root" for installs on XAMPP, or anywhere

[frank18]

came with:
Apache 2.4.9 (Unix)
OpenSSL 1.9.1g
PHP 5.5.11 (Zend: 2.5.0)
MySQL 5.6.16

Server OS: Linux 3.13.0-36-generic

......

Now you can continual with the install/upgrade as you would of before... be sure to add this user in your config files and not root. The user and database in the image no longer exist..

so, lesson learned... always create a database user!! Passing it along

There is no such problem with MySQL 5.5.x (ie on my local dev environment).

Is your server OS Debian (Ubuntu, Mint) based or a derivative of the Red Hat family (CentOS...) ? This could make a difference when accessing MySQL as Root.