title: PMA error : mbstring is missing
body: <p>I am running on Windows 7 64 bit with:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Apache 2.2</li>
  <li>PHP 5.2.8</li>
  <li>MySQL 5.1 (essentials)</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>installed and <strong>configured manually</strong>. As you all know, for this since MySQL essentials has no GUI for interaction the best suit is PhpMyAdmin. I am trying to get <strong>phpMyAdmin-4.0.10.8-english</strong>, downloaded from the PMA website, into my Apache web server. </p>
  
  <p>After all configuration work, now I get an error message when I try to log into PMA saying: </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>"The mbstring extension is missing. Please check your PHP
    configuration."</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>In this forum it was mentioned that possible causes for this are the unavailability of <code>php_mbstring.dll</code> in php folder or else the <code>extension_dir</code> variable in <code>php.ini</code> is set to <code>./</code> which is the current folder. </p>
  
  <p>I checked in the <code>ext</code> folder and the <code>.dll</code> file is available and the <code>extension_dir</code> variable is set to <code>./ext</code>. And I tried setting the variable to <code>C:/php/ext</code> which is the absolute location, still it doesn't work. Any help on this concern would be much appreciated! </p>