Zend Core 2.0 does not work with PEAR

Trying to install Zend Platform 3 for Windows I was surprised to see that it requires Zend Core 2.0 now. Ok, so it removed my installation of XAMP to give this one a try.
Unfortunately the trial ended soon. My first step after running the installer was to try to install some PEAR packages using go-pear, [...]