Well Peter,
Nevermind, there were lots of Issues going the XAMPP way, so I just installed Tomcat separately and all is fine now.
I used instructions from
http://www.scribd.com/doc/495993/Installing-Apache-Tomcat-6-and-Using-It-With-Eclipse and it was just a walk-in-the-park..
EDIT :
I have one small quirk though..
Let's just say I'm trying a basic 'Dynamic Web Application' in Eclipse (I have the Java EE Developers' package installed), with a basic helloworld servlet like this :
http://codepad.org/KzSB4m6z. Everytime, I need to put in the .CLASS that gets generated in the 'eclipse_workspace> proj_name > build > classes ' into 'eclipse_workspace> proj_name > WebContent' manually. Is there an automatic setting that does this ? I find that only by manually copying the .CLASS file to the location I mentioned does it work, otherwise it refuses to.
I'm using the local instance of Apache Tomcat from within Eclipse.