i followed the instructions and found them to be very helpfull.

i needed to one more step though because it gave me the following error:

Client does not support authentication protocol requested
by server; consider upgrading MySQL client

i looked it up on google and found this link: <a href=http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/old-client.html>link</a>

basically it says that the new version of mysql uses a new type of password. i went into the command prompt and changed my account's password using the command they suggest: mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR
-> 'some_user'@'some_host' = OLD_PASSWORD('newpwd');

this fixed the problem for the mysqli functions, but its weird because i'm using php 5.0.0 and shouldn't it be compatable? the mysql version i'm using is 4.1.9

the weird thing is though i've got all the mysqli functions working, but the regular mysql ones don't seem to work. also, i've been trying to get the PEAR ones to work too. i ran that go-pear thing, accepted all the defaults and ran the thing thats supposed to put stuff in the registry. is there anything else i gotta do? i thought i saw something about adding something to the path in environmental variables. what would i have to add?

so my problems are the regular mysql functions don't work, and i'm not sure if i have to do anything else to get the PEAR database stuff working