The latest iteration of zp will not install on latest version of xampp.
When I try to install on th the previous version of xampp, the installer asks to fix a few items (which I do by clicking apply) but at that point there is no where to click to go further, I am at dead end and install will not go further.
Not sure what you mean with UTF8 in this context. But that setup note is not an error and no show stopper. And you can always set that on the optons later as well.
Without any error messages we cannot help as we are not using XAMPP.
Be sure not to use PHP 8 as we clearly state that that does not work yet.