I see the others who answered this, but the answer says to log in as root and create a new user and database. I can't even get that far. I just installed a brand new XAMPP instance, start it and when I go to localhost/phpmyadmin, I get the error message in the subject line.
I also have:
2002 No such file or directory
The server is not responding (or the local server's socket is not correctly configured)
I checked that as well and I see the socket info in the config is left blank and the comment above it says that it will just use the mysql defaults.
When I go to the status page for XAMPP, it says that the MySQL database is activated. I just can't connect to phpmyadmin.
I literally did nothing else from install to startup to trying to get to phpmyadmin.