maybe you could begin to post your routes and maybe part of controller code and tree of the views you use...I use xampp as well and there is no problem and didn't changed what you mentioned....
if you work with virtual hosts, don't forget to change your windows host file...and avoid .dev extension...
so if you have a project x1 ... name your virtual host x1.localhost for example if you want to check with Chrome..
otherwise you could still access with localhost/x1/public but there are some things (ajax..) that could not work without some adaptations...
basically for a project x1
I change (add entry for new dev) the file D:\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf
with
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "D:/xampp/htdocs/x1/public"
ServerName x1.localhost
</VirtualHost>
and the servername C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
with
127.0.0.1 x1.localhost
restart xampp apache....then access url with x1.localhost in your browser
otherwise... provide some code to check....