Going back to absolute basics here. The answers on this page and a little googling have brought me to the following resolution to my issue. Steps to restart the apache service with Xampp installed:-

1. Click the start button and type CMD (if on Windows Vista or later and Apache is installed as a service make sure this is an elevated command prompt)
2. In the command window that appears type cd C:\xampp\apache\bin (the default installation path for Xampp)
3. Then type httpd -k restart

I hope that this is of use to others just starting out with running a local Apache server.

What about apache debug mode (-X) ?

apache2 -X -d. -f.htaccess -C"PidFile `mktemp`"  -C"Listen 1025" 
-C"ErrorLog /dev/stdout" -C"DocumentRoot `pwd`"

to put it in the background once started you may use Ctrl^Z then type "bg"

Using the the FOREGROUND flag, wrapping it up in a shell script:

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then 
    echo "$0 <port> <dir>"
    exit 10 
fi
/usr/sbin/apache2 -DFOREGROUND -d. -f.htaccess -C"PidFile `mktemp`" \ 
-C"Listen $1" -C"ErrorLog /dev/stdout" -C"DocumentRoot $2" -e debug

call it "pache", chmod +x, then you can run

./pache 1026 /tmp/webroot