thanks for all your help.

I guess I will just tell the owner about this problem with Verio's setup. The last note they sent me said:
Quote
Due to the nature of the Shared Web Hosting environment in which your account is hosted, the webserver and PHP have been configured to ensure security and reliabilty for all the accounts hosted on the server. For this reason some scripts will not be compatible with the configuration on our servers.

If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact us.
and a different person has answered each email.

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