Thanks Mac but I eventually got desperate and gave up and reinstalled PHP.
Now I can get back onto PHP Admin page and set up mysql user and user name but now my php scripts that access mysql are giving the following error
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: [2002] A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not (trying to connect via tcp://localhost:3306) in C:\PHP\EasyPHP-5.3.3\www\portfolio\createdatabase.php on line 2
even if I change to username to root and no password. I assume it is something to do with TCP/IP protocols but don't know where to start looking.