Problem solved, although I'm not quite sure how/why. I'm not exactly sure what caused the problem, but after I did a make clean and reconfigure/recompile, it started working correctly.
Not sure if it's still necessary, but the configuration command was :
'./configure' '--prefix=/usr' '--datadir=/usr/share/php' '--mandir=/usr/share/man' '--bindir=/usr/bin' '--libdir=/usr/share' '--includedir=/usr/include' '--sysconfdir=/etc' '--with-_lib=lib64' '--with-config-file-path=/etc' '--with-exec-dir=/usr/lib64/php/bin' '--disable-debug' '--enable-inline-optimization' '--enable-memory-limit' '--enable-magic-quotes' '--enable-safe-mode' '--enable-sigchild' '--disable-ctype' '--with-pgsql' '--without-mysql' '--disable-cli' '--without-pear' '--with-openssl' '--with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs2-prefork' 'x86_64-suse-linux'
Again, after the rebuild, it worked. As far as I know I wasn't doing anything new except getting frustrated, which is when I decided to do the make clean. Apparently that's what solved the problem. Is that reasonable for a miscompile?
Thanks for the advice, though. I appreciate it.