cakePHP calls crashing Apache

While doing some experimenting on cakePHP, I kept getting win32 exception errors from apache.exe causing it to stop.  It doesn’t happen on my other PHP programs.  So I thought maybe it had something to do with how cakePHP is using PHP and apache.

To figure out what was happening, I allowed Visual Studio to debug the apache.exe at the point of the error.  While in debug mode, I checked the call-stack to see any information that might give me a clue and there it was.  The last call was ZendOptimization().

Now since I’m not really using Zend extensions on my programs.  I thought maybe I should try disabling this just to isolate the problem.  To do that commented out the Zend options in my php.ini.  After a few tries, it still wasn’t working, then realized there were 2 copies of the php.ini one was under the xampp\php and another was under xampp\apache\bin.  Well you guessed it, I should have been editing the one under xampp\apache\bin for this to take effect.  And of course don’t forget to restart your apache.