After a long-awaited reinstall of Windows XP on my laptop, I came across a rather annoying problem as I was restoring my WIMP web development platform (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP).

After installing PHP 5.2.3 with the appropriate MySQL and MySQLi DLL's enabled in php.ini, I would get an error message six seconds or so after a PHP page loaded. The error looked something like this:

After scouring Google for a solution to this problem, I discovered a couple things:

1. The bug has been recognized by PHP as a problem since 5.2.2. It turns out there's a problem with the MySQL and MySQLi DLL's that are bundled with PHP 5.2.2 and 5.2.3. Here's the bug report for this problem: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=41350

2. There is a temporary fix! To avoid this error message, download the zip package of PHP 5.2.1 from http://us.php.net/get/php-5.2.1-Win32.zip/from/a/mirror. Replace your current lib_mysql.dll and lib_mysqli.dll with the files of the same name from the 5.2.1 zip package.*

Since PHP is aware of the problem, I'm anticipating an end to this problem when PHP 5.2.4 rolls out; for now, though, we'll have to make do with a bit of version-mixing.

*You might need to set the correct file permissions to these files to allow the system to access them