I think the issue with changing the status of magic quotes may be that you might not be able to activate them at runtime if they're not already activated in PHP.ini (versus turning them off at runtime when they're on by default). Is that the contradiction you've seen in the documentation, or did it just pretty blatantly say one thing somewhere and exactly the opposite somewhere else (I'd believe either... they go through versions very quickly)?
Adding the set_magic_quotes_runtime(0); function at the beginning of the script fixed the problem as well, by the way (I've removed it now so that you may run whatever tests you need to on an unaltered board).
