scoutt, it was really simple. After spending literally 10 hours tearing my hair out I figured out what was going on. In the address bar, the first link I opened always said

http://127.0.0.1/filename.whatever

But when I clicked a php link from there it would say

file//c:\apache2\htdocs\whatever\whatever

That told me it was being interpreted as a file and not as a file on the server or whatever the correct terminology is.

So I opened config.inc.php and this is how I had modified this line since the instructions were extremely vague.

$cfgPmaAbsoluteUri = 'c:\apache2\htdocs\phpmyadmin';

I took a guess and changed it as follows:

$cfgPmaAbsoluteUri = 'http://127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin';

problem solved. What a headache. That's the kind of stuff they need to tell you about. They say the absolute path. That is not an absolute path. That is a server path. The absolute path is what I did originally.

Anyway, the pages are doing what they're supposed to be I think. I haven't tried to create a database yet, but that's next.