I have PHPEd 5.0.1 and used it for the longest time without any issues on 32 bit XP and before that for some time on Windows 2000 as well. I know have a 64 bit system and installed XP 64 bit. I then installed PHPEd 5.0.1 and edited php.ini so that any path matches the 64 bit environment (mainly changing "Program Files" into "Program Files (x86)").
First, I got constant errors that the mbstring.dll could not be found, but I was able to fix that by copying that dll into the same folder as php.exe and php-cgi.exe (one level up). That got things going for displaying the start page of my project, which is a login page. Typically, as soon as I start the project in debug mode I get a crash. Sometimes it manages to display the login page and then upon submitting the user name and password I get the same crash (more crash info below). The crash is followed by an error message that the debugger session cannot be started, but I think that is just a result of the initial crash.

Now, here is some more crash info. It appears as that not PHPEd itself goes under, but PHP. The "do you want to report this to Microsoft" error claims that the crash is in CGI / FastCGI and when looking at the error signature I get this:
AppName: php-cgi.exe AppVer: 5.2.3.3 ModName: php_mbstring.dll ModVer: 5.2.3.3 Offset: 00001a76

Since that indicates an issue with php-cgi.exe and mabstring.dll I downloaded the latest PHP version as ZIP archive, renamed the php5 folder, unzipped the newer files into a new php5 folder, and then copied the php.ini file from the old into the new folder (just like I always did and it always worked). This does not make any difference and yes, I copied the updated mbstring.dll one level higher as well.

I then installed VirtualPC (should have used VMWare, I know) and created a 32bit Windows virtual machine. Installed PHPEd into it, copied my project files over and gave that a try. That works fine, but is dog slow (I blame that on VPC). Now, regardless of VPC or VMWare, I don't want to run the IDE in a virtual machine. The test showed though that the difference appears to be between 32bit XP and 64bit XP (which is the same as Server 2003 64bit).

EDIT: While looking around I came across the 64 bit implementation of PHP, a project by fusion-x lan. I tried that and that failed as well. I also took some more time to think about this whole issue and to my surprise I run apachefriends.org's XAMPP on an XP 64bit system without any problems. My project works fine there.
So what is the difference? I don't use the debugger dll on that system (is there even a 64 bit version of the debugger?) and my 'real' server is Apache, not NuSphere's srv.exe. Could it just be that the srv.exe is not capable of running properly on 64 bit Windows? I copied the local URL of the project and stripped the debug session ID stuff off, then I used Firefox to connect to Srv.exe. Since I also have VisualStudio installed I instantly got a message asking me which VS debugger I want to use. That is typically an indication for some program not working properly, which I think might be srv.exe.

So, is there a version of NuSphere 5.0.x that runs on 64 bit Windows?

Does anyone have a clue as to what I should do to get everything to work on XP 64bit ? I yet have to check out the behaviour of other PHP IDEs such as Waterproof's editor or the one from Luckasoft just to see if they too see a php-cgi.exe crash, which would rule out PHPEd being the issue entirely, but it wouldn't help me much either.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Maybe you should try to reinstall phpED in c:\program files\ directory? (yes, in the directory containing 64-bit applications). It doesn't change anything on runtime, but maybe you didn't change all the paths (in *.ini and registry for example) so it may work this way.

Hi! Thank you very much for this excellent tip. I did change the installation path to go to the 64 bit application directory (C:\Program Files\) and out of a sudden it all started working fine. That looks as if PHPEd or the installer make use of hard coded directory names.

...or so I thought. After enabling the dlls that I need the same problem started again. Eventually the whole thing crashes again and in the end it doesn't help. That is really disappointing, but it appears as that the official reply remains that I have to spend money and buy a new version to overcome this flaw. I'm not upset that there is a bug in the software, those things happen. I'm upset that NuSphere sends me a quote instead of a bug fix. As great as PHPEd is (as long as it worked) NuSphere's support really needs to shape up and try and help people out. My version is not even a year old.

"Typically, as soon as I start the project in debug mode I get a crash."

I don't know if this is true (because I'm not a nusphere programmer), but I think, that phpEd is using custom build libraries to enable the debug mode. If that's true, then using standard dll's wont work in debug mode, because they are completely different and lack debug mode support.

My suggestion is to download latest phpED trial version and copy PHP libs from that package into your full version (but beware of possible PHP version conflicts).

no no no, Under 'php4' and 'php5' NuSphere distributes _STANDARD_ php binaries downloaded php.net web sites NOTHING ELSE.
If it crashes under your system, feel free to submit bug report at http://bugs.php.net
NuSphere is not responsible for crashes in php anyway.


Regarding debugger for x64 systems, please first make sure that your php is 64bit or 32bit. In latter case you should use 32bit debugger modules. In former case, you need 64bit debugger modules and we started distributing them with PhpED version 5.2