Welcome to the board thanater, if your using a non-Unix based system e.g. Windows you must realise what you do that works on this system may not necessarily work on your hosts machine, reason being that some functions will work differently under each system, so dont be too concerned if one thing works on your local system to find it doesnt work on your hosts system, a good majority of the time this comes into File/Directory System Permissions which compared to say Windows are quite strict, if its not a File/Directory System problem more than likely the php.ini will be different to yours.
As for what jannoy has posted my only concern is using IIS. PHP works differently under IIS because of the way its imported, i suggest using Apache its the most widely used Web Server although the Win32 Version is somewhat buggy it will still work for most of the tasks.
