These five steps will hopefully help you to enable the Fileinfo extension for PHP under Windows. These steps assume you have the extension installed (e.g. php\ext\php_fileinfo.dll). They worked for me using Xampplite 1.7.1 and PHP 5.2.9.

1. Download GnuWin version 4.23 (the version number is significant) - your best bet is http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32/files/file/4.23/file-4.23-bin.zip/download
2. Extract the contents of file-4.23-bin.zip\share\file\ to a folder on your machine - I went with path\to\xampplite\php\extras\magic\
3. Add an environment variable, named MAGIC, to your machine with the value pointing at the file named magic - in my example: path\to\xampplite\php\extras\magic\magic
4. Add a line (or uncomment an existing line) to your php.ini: extension=php_fileinfo.dll
5. Restart Apache if it was already running.

That's it!

These steps are probably what you need if you are seeing errors such as these:

• Failed to load magic database
• Fileinfo could not load the magic file
• The given magicfile can not be read
• The given magicfile is not accepted by finfo

(The last two of these error messages are specific to Zend Framework)

References:

• http://php.net/manual/en/function.finfo-open.php#82551
• http://pecl.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=7555