Zend Optimizer 3.3.3 (latest version of the program at time of writing) seems to be incompatible with PHP 5.2.10 and 5.2.11 builds as well as the more documented issue with PHP 5.3 . If you have just reinstalled your computer / fresh installed then you would expect that downloading the latest stable versions of PHP would be the way to go. Well thats not the case when trying to get viart and the zend optimizer working with your install!
I tried to install other versions of PHP on my new windows 7 install but all had failed.
XP installations had become quite reliable in the last 2 or so years by using the PHP compiled MSI install files.
On windows 7 however, both 5.2 and 5.3 revisions of these installs just didnt work automatically. I spent many wasted hours trying, slowly making progress past repeated different errors to try and get php running under my new Windows 7 / IIS7.5 build.
In the end although I had fought past many errors I eventually couldnt get past fatal exception errors printed to screen when the PHP scripts I used called the mysql_connect command. It's possible it was was a file permissions issue, maybe something to do with writing temp files but I never got to the bottom of it.
Anyhow, I eventually got PHP going on Windows7 by using the "Web Platform Installer" that is available for IIS 7.5 / Windows 7 (and I believe other IIS7 variants?). To my huge surprise and delight, php worked straight away having installed it just 2 mouse clicks!!!! I had never had a windows PHP install work so easily.
The issue though is that currently this php release installed by the platform installer is 5.2.11 and this isnt working with Zend. So that was the problem I hit today. I eventually had a simple idea which worked which I wanted to share....
I got around this by simply downloading an archived copy of 5.2.9 from the PHP website and copying the ZIPs contents into the \program files\PHP folder.
Get an older working zend compatible copy here at
http://www.php.net/releases/
Hope this helps someone!
