I have a file named "prepend.php3" which is being auto_prepended to
all my pages. That file contains a number of require() statements which
contains the actual code that is to be auto_prepended. One of these files
contains a syntax error (a string constant with a dynamic initialization
as in

  class Statbox {
    var $statcache = "$DOCUMENT_ROOT/cache/statbox.html";
   ...
  }

which is illegal in PHP4).

When statbox.inc is required from the main page manually, I get a proper
error message

Parse error: parse error in statbox.inc on line 4

When statbox.inc is required from the auto_prepended file
prepend.php3, I get

Fatal error: Failed opening required 'statbox.inc'
(include_path='/home/kris/www/test.koehntopp.de/local_php:/home/kris/www/test.koehntopp.de/php') in
/home/kris/www/test.koehntopp.de/local_php/prepend.php3 on line 32

which is a very different error message and misleading.