I encountered this problem today and eventually I realize it was the comment on the line before the mysql dll’s that was causing the problem.

This is what you should have in php.ini by default for PHP 5.5.16:

;extension=php_exif.dll       Must be after mbstring as it depends on it
;extension=php_mysql.dll
;extension=php_mysqli.dll

Besides removing the semi-colons, you also need to delete the line of comment that came after php_exif.dll. This leaves you with

extension=php_exif.dll      
extension=php_mysql.dll
extension=php_mysqli.dll

This solves the problem in my case.