header('Location: [url]') should do the trick. You'll definitely get a pause if you try doing a meta tag redirect.
The only thing I can think of (at this moment at least) is you're seeing your URL up in the address bar because your web server is choking on your code as it tries to figure out which link to use. In theory, you shouldn't need much code to do this and the web server shouldn't be choking, but thats the only thing I can think of.
To test this theory, I'd suggest commenting out all your database lookup code and hardcode the header() function to a particular URL and see how that works. If it works fine, cool - you have a coding issue with the database. If it doesn't work, then header() isn't going to work for you.
