this one bit quite a bit of chunk out of my you-know-what. seems like if you're running multiple database servers on the same host (for eg. MySQL on a number of ports) you can't use pconnect since the port number isn't part of the key for database connections. especially if you have the same username and password to connect to all the database servers running on different ports. but then it might be php-MySQL specific. you might get a connection for an entirely different port than the one you asked for.
