It would be good to get to the bottom of this. If anyone out there understands what Windows does in these circumstances, can they shed some light on proceedings.

I don't have any of the databases that need extensions, so the only extension I routinely use is GD, however it is my experience on NT4 that I never have to stick any dll (php or otherwise) in winnt or winnt/system32 unless it is going to be shared by some other application. I can always just put them in the same directory as the program that calls them and all is well.

Is W2K different, or are the database extension dlls different.

We need to know, not only for the installation notes, but also for the installer software which sticks things in c:/php by default.

When I was having the problem, I could load certain extensions just fine (e.g., php_gd.dll and php_db.dll). However, the database extensions would not load.

My interpretation is that the database DLLs depend on one or more of the DLLs that are provided in the dll directory of the distribution. Perhaps there's another way to get Windows to find those DLLs without putting them in the WINNT directory (setting the path, maybe?).

they should be in the extension dir specified in php.ini which is clearly documented through out the configuration docs.

-James

The whole time I was having trouble, all the 'extension' DLLs (such as php_mssql70.dll) *were* in the extensions directory, and the php.ini was pointing to that directory.

The DLLs that need to be copied to winnt\system32 (or wherever Windows can find them) are the ones in the "dlls" directory (expat.dll, FdfTk.dll, gds32.dll, gnu_gettext.dll, jvm.dll, libeay32.dll, libpq.dll, libasl.dll, msvcrt.dll, Ntwdblib.dll, sablot.dll, SSLeay32.dll, yaz.dll).

It's mentioned in the manual now.