I’ve only recently returned to PHP and MySQL development on my new(ish) Windows 7 64-bit laptop after having done mostly Java development and static HTML sites over the last few months. Having gone through the development environment setup for Apache / PHP / MySQL etc. a million times before I just went through the motions and installed the latest versions of each component – namely Apache 2.2.16, PHP 5.3.3 and MySQL 5.1.44 at the time of writing. Assuming everything would just work as expected, I dived into development, but quickly noticed things weren’t quite right…

The first problem I encountered was with the guided setup for a new Drupal 7 alpha installation. As soon as it got to the MySQL database configuration step, it seemed to fail with a blank web page. No errors or hints as to what was wrong. Then I noticed a similar problem trying to login to a new PHPMyAdmin install. I double checked all the configuration files, re-installed both PHP and MySQL, but the problem was still happening.

At this point I did some Googling and found a post stating that it was a problem with an authentication incompatibility between PHP 5.3 and MySQL 5 and recommended rolling back to PHP 5.2.14. I tried this as suggested and both Drupal and PHPMyAdmin sprung back to life. So I’m sticking with PHP 5.2.14 for the time being…

[UPDATE] I’ve since done a bit more Googling and found this post which suggests it could in fact be an IPv6 related issue. I’ll do some more investigation when I get time.