Why does the web based install of Magento 2 on Windows 7 localhost using XAMPP always fail?

Question

This is on Windows, so the usual advice regarding chmod etc doesn't apply. By "fail" I mean I get no css styling and 404's with almost every link.

Here is what I did to try, does anyone have any suggestions please?

1. Set up an Apache URL in XAMPP (7.0.8) - I used http://localhost/www.example.com with this httpd.conf entry

    Alias /www.example.com "E:\www\magento\www.example.com"

    <Directory "E:\www\magento\www.example.com">
      Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI Includes
      AllowOverride All
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from all
      RewriteEngine On
    </Directory>

(Added a file showing phpinfo() there to prove basic serving & php works and confirm apaches mod_rewrite is enabled.)

2. In MySql, "create database magento_example;"
3. From https://www.magentocommerce.com/download, Download Community Edition 2.1.1 zip
4. Unzip to E:\www\magento\www.example.com
5. Before commencing, edit app\etc\di.xml so the "view_preprocessed" value is changed from "Symlink" to "Copy"

Before:
<item name="view_preprocessed" xsi:type="object">Magento\Framework\App\View\Asset\MaterializationStrategy\Symlink</item>
After:
<item name="view_preprocessed" xsi:type="object">Magento\Framework\App\View\Asset\MaterializationStrategy\Copy</item>

6. Visit http://localhost/www.example.com/setup & begin - ensure readiness check passes 100%
7. Complete the database setup appropriately
8. Note the generated admin URL
9. Customise the locale if required
10. Create admin acc & proceed. Observe "success" message when done.
11. Click launch Magento Admin. Observe 404.
12. Visit http://localhost/www.example.com. Observe unstyled page. Click "Sign in". Observe 404. Click "Privacy Policy." Observe 404.
13. View source. Click link for a sample CSS - e.g. calendar.css. Observe 404.
14. Note: Situation currently identical to https://community.magento.com/t5/Just-Ask-Alan/Magento-2-front-amp-backend-returning-404-error-after/m-p/39961#M454
15. Delete all files in var/cache, pub/static (except .htaccess)
16. In root of site, "php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy"
17. Using Chrome, Switch Person | Browse as Guest to eliminate browser cache/cookie problems
18. Observe many files copied, yet after completion still same as (12)
19. Check /var/log - observe only 2 files, debug.log and install.log, both of which are full but don't provide anything useful.