Installing ioncube locally on windows

I am currently working in new office for few weeks and I am using their laptop to upgrade their old community magento version to latest magento enterprise version. They have almost $3 million sales, so the data is huge to do import/export. We heard Unirgy's uRapidFlow extension is quite good for large import/export. So, we purchased the module but it required ioncube.

We followed the documentation to install ioncube but no matter what we do, we couldn't get success on installing it. We were constantly getting this error "Failed loading C:\wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.22\bin\ioncube\ioncube_loader_win_5.4.dll"

After we checked the apache error log we realized we have 64bit version of wamp installed and there was no ioncube that worked properly on 64 bit windows platforms. So, we uninstalled wamp and re-downloaded the 32Bit version of wamp server and followed the procedure again. This time it worked!

So what did we do?

Step 1:

goto: http://www.ioncube.com/loaders.php and download the version you required. In our case, Windows VC9 (x86), worked : http://downloads2.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_win_vc9_x86_ipf.zip

Step 2:

Unzip it and run the installer and select any folder when prompted. We selected C:\wamp\www\ioncube

Step 3:

Open ioncube loader-wizard.php through browser that was created at folder you selected in step 2. e.g. http://localhost/ioncube/loader-wizard.php

Step 4:

It might ask you to copy right dll file from above folder to C:\wamp\bin\apache\apacheX.X.XX\bin\ioncube, so, we copied there.

Step 5:

It will give you syntax to include ioncube in php.ini, you can copy the syntax and paste on very top of the file, save and restart wamp.
Our php.ini looks like this:

zend_extension = "C:\wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.22\bin\ioncube\ioncube_loader_win_5.4.dll"
 <?php 
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; About php.ini   ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; PHP's initialization file, generally called php.ini, is responsible for
... and so on...

Note: Make sure you download the Thread safe version, else you will be asked to download thread safe version again. Loader-Wizard.php will give you the correct link to the file.

After successful install we got this message:

Loader Installed
The ionCube Loader version 4.2.1 for PHP 5.4 is already installed and encoded files should run without problems.

-- I hope it will save some time for everyone who couldn't install ioncube successfully ---