Just a follow up. This error occurred on my local Windows test server. I also have the same exact site running on a production Linux server.

The linux appears to work fine. I've tried to duplicate the error I'm getting on my windows machine in the exact same way on the linux server and so far no errors. So it looks like it has something to do with the XAMPP distro.

Still, any help from anyone here would be appreciated, as I can't get anything useful out of their forum.