I have the typical suite of applications and servers in my development environment including all of the items listed below. When debugging is disabled in php.ini everything works as it expected. In particular phpMyAdmin works as it should. However when I enable debugging in php.ini by adding extension=php_dbg.dll I am no longer able to create the session files on disk. Specifically phpMyAdmin throws the following error when debugging is enabled.

"cannot start session without errors, please check errors given in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly."

If I comment out the the extension all applications and services return to normal operation.

This appears to be affecting the session.save_path in the php config. When debugging is disabled, phpinfo(); shows the string in the config file. When debug is enabled AND no applications have attempted to create session files on disk phpinfo(); still shows the string in the conf file.

session.save_path = local val: c:\xampp\tmp master val: c:\xampp\tmp

However, AFTER an application has attempted to create a session when debug is enabled phpinfo(); shows the following odd characters and the application(s) throw corresponding errors. After each subsequent attempt the characters reported by phpinfo(); change

NOTE: special characters could not be posted in this message body. See attached image.



Anyone have any suggestions on how to tackle this? Is this a bug in the php_dbg.dll?

Thanks in advance. Hope this is in the right place

Aries

Development Environment Versions
Debug DLL: php_dbg.dll-5.2.x
phpEd 5.2
PHP DGB Listener 3.2.14
Windows XP Pro SP2
Apache 2.2.9 (Win32) DAV/2
mod_ssl 2.2.9
OpenSSL 0.9.8h
PHP/5.2.6
phpMyAdmin 2.11.7[list=][/list]

It's not clear from the way you worded the problem whether this is just hot air, but you mentioned in the title "Unable to create session using debug DLL php_dbg.dll-5.2.x" but in your post you mentioned adding "extension=php_dbg.dll" in the php.ini file.
Of course the php.ini file should read "extension=php_dbg.dll-5.2.x" and that file should also be installed in the extensions folder of your php installation.
If it's not the above, simple issue, then sorry for wasting your time.

Of course, if that is the case, then if you happen to upgrade to version 5.5 then the debugger dlls have all changed too so you'd have to copy the new dll into your php installation's extensions folder and edit php.ini to match the new dll name. (see won-t-upgrade-debugger-protocol-error-t5131.html)
Apologies again if your problem is not this basic one.

Hello,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Old habits die hard. When taking the file distributed in phpEd I generally rename the file to php_dbg.dll when I put it in the php/ext directory. For good measure I have dropped the file in and left the filename alone and changed the php.ini to reflect the full filenname. This yielded the same result.

Thanks,
Aries

Debugger has no relation to php session handler and may not cause the problem you experienced.
Probably it's a bug in php itself that is triggered by different memory structure when configuration is changed with added php extension (like dbg). Try to keep dbg and remove all other extensions one by one to see if session path returns to normal.