OK, so now I'm totally confused.
There MUST be a soap section output from phpinfo() otherwise these two statements could not be true:
soap works fine from a browser.
this specific script works from a browser as well
Actually, they could be true if you were not using PHP's SOAP and were using a different SOAP (eg. Apache Axis) but, basically, if you have a PHP script that creates a (PHP5 built-in) SOAP client that works, you have to have a soap section as part of phpinfo() output.
Also, this statment has me confused:
So i am running it using exec to run it in the background.
Why would you need to exec a program from php when you are at the commandline already? If execing works, then just run the program.