I meant the phpmyadmin section of the xampp, so I suspect my code doesn’t play a role in there. I got the error on the login page and then after I logged in as well. However I turned it on this morning and it was gone.
I had a new error that said #2006 mysql server gone away when I tried inserting data. This I corrected by increasing the max_allowed_packet from 1m to 10m.
Not sure what is happening but it is working now.