I looked up all other questions regarding this, but they didn\'t help, so:
I\'m running xampp(lite) on a Windows Server 2003 machine inside a domain, apache is insta
Check your PHP.ini file just incase those functions you've mentioned are in the disallowed setting. Not something standard from a XAMPP release though, but worth checking.
You say you're not getting any errors, I will assume your server is set as a service, therfore any commands sent using exe, system, passthru etc.. will be done in the background, so you won't see them running, but you should be able to capture data though.
Try the above and see what happens, you should get a response from command line, otherwise, it's possible it could be due to permissions.