During the installation of Apache2 I got the following message into cmd window:
Installing the Apache2.2 service The Apache2.2 service is successful
I hope this helps others with this error.
Run the httpd.exe from the command line to get an accurate description of the problem.
I had the same error message and it turned out to be a miss configured ServerRoot path. Even after running setup_xampp.bat the httpd.conf had the wrong path.
My error.log was empty and starting the service does not give an informative error message.