I am very new at all of this. I have been teaching myself how to work with code and now with PHP. I ran into the same problem and spent several hours looking for a solution. My problem is that I am running win 7 64 bit. Here is the fix if this is your problem:
In the config.inc.php file you need to change
$cfg[$i]['host'] = 'localhost'; to $cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = '127.0.0.1';
For some reason they are not recognized by Windows 7 as being the same. (it runs fine without the change on my XP machine)
I found this informaitn on another forum, hope it helps.
wow, thank you so much!! I've been trying to get phpMyAdmin working on Windows 7 x64 for nearly two weeks and this one little setting has fixed everything! You rock!!