Upgrading PHP to 8.3.9 from 8.2.12 on Windows 11 – cURL is not working

Steps I am taking:

  1. Fresh install of XAMPP, which uses PHP 8.2.12.
  2. After install, I confirm that cURL shows enabled in my phpinfo and my local coding files work as expected.
  3. I renamed the existing php folder in my xampp directory to php_old.
  4. I downloaded a thread-safe version of php 8.3.9 and unzip to a new ‘php’ folder in xampp directory.
  5. Checking phpinfo again, it does show that my php version was updated to 8.3.9, but cURL is completely missing.

The only thing I know to check:

I went to the php.ini-development file, uncommented ‘extension=curl’, and saved it as a new php.ini. Still nothing in phpinfo.

I feel like I am missing something completely stupid here.