Thanks Ben,
After tirelessly and frantically searching for an answer, I decided that fixing the xampp issue of installing composer was going to be harder than just moving all my files and reinstalling xampp. I did a reinstall and just like magic composer and git are operating flawlessly. There was some sort of corruption I'm assuming . Of course, I had installed ioncube and about 50 different apps and I do remember doing some hacking to get things to work throughout all those installs. Either I had caused a corruption along the way or I had been getting around the issue for some time.
Now, with a fresh install of the xampp stack, I'm now only experiencing one issue. I was able to get the skeleton zend app installed and running but the files will not dynamically load in dreamweaver. I thought it was the .htaccess rewriting of urls so I first took that out of the equation. I read something about using Pass through before I fell asleep last night so I'm going to keep digging on that.
I have to admit composer really makes things easier. I installed fuel framework last night also and at first glance it seems amazing.
Also, your assumption of a windows system was accurate.