httpd.exe

is short for HTTP Daemon processes. If you are having port issues with Apache, terminate all the httpd.exe processes. Apache starts up multiple processes because it is expecting to handle multiple incoming requests and hand off the requests to different child processes for faster performance. If you kill off one of the child processes, the httpd parent process will automatically restart the child once it detects that the child is dead. None of this sounds good but that's the terminology and there's even a "daemon" in there. So to kill httpd successfully you have to kill the parent first.