Are you absolutely sure you updated PHP correctly? All the dlls from the dlls/ folder too?

And could you come up with a short example script using some
public ldap server so that I can try it myself within Linux?

"Are you absolutely sure you updated PHP correctly? All the dlls from the dlls/ folder too?" - I am positive. I copied the dlls folder to system32 just to check. Same result. 4.3 is completely functional except I have to use the php_ldap.dll file from 4.2.3.

"And could you come up with a short example script using some public ldap server so that I can try it myself within Linux?" - I really can't. The only reason I can't is that our network would go haywire if I set up a temporary Active Directory server.

Is it possible that the changes made cause the search function to look at the criteria differently? Maybe my search string is no longer valid?

Please don't reply to your own report using 'Add Comment',
use 'Edit Submission' link instead!!!

And yes, it might be possible that your search string is not
valid, please ask on some openldap mailing list.

And I didn't ask for you to make your own ldap server public, but come up with script accessing one of these 
servers:

   http://www.emailman.com/ldap/public.html 

I'm on the edit submission tab but it still says "New Comment" I hope this is the right way to respond to this. Anyway, I will try to build a simple sample on Monday. Thanks!

leaving as feedback until a response comes in...

Ok, I give up. After I actually found one of those servers that worked I couldn't find a single valid attribute to search on. I tried cn, name, ... and other common attribute types. All returned invalid attribute type. So here's a simpler sample of the problem:

<?PHP
$ds=ldap_connect("censored");  
$dn = "cn=censored, ou=censored, dc=ibs, dc=org";
$password = "censored";
$dir = "cn=users, dc=IBS, dc=org";  
$criteria = "'name=Ryan Jameson (USA)'";
if ($ds) { 
    $r=ldap_bind($ds,$dn,$password);    
    $sr=ldap_search($ds,$dir, $criteria);  
    $info = ldap_get_entries($ds, $sr);
    echo count($info) . " records returned.";
}
ldap_close($ds);
?>


PHP 4.2.3 extension returns: 1 records returned.
PHP 4.3.0 extension returns:
Warning: ldap_search(): Search: Bad search filter in R:\WebApps\api\ldapSearcherTest.php on line 9

Warning: ldap_get_entries(): supplied argument is not a valid ldap result resource in R:\WebApps\api\ldapSearcherTest.php on line 10
0 records returned.

Aha... it doesn't like the parens ... also, it seems to not like the single quote. The problem with that is if i don't use the single quotes I get back 2 records. :-\

Sorry, I was counting the wrong thing... the single quotes are not required, but the parens are a problem. Anyway, that seems to be what it boils down to.

Ok, I'll close this. Basically the functionality has been changed a bit, it seems that the new version of php_ldap.dll now requires escape characters on special characters including '(' & ')' ... the old version for win32 did not. It appears that this has been the case on the unix based versions for some time now.

It's propably due some change in the openldap library version which is used when the win32 binaries are build.
(it now also has sasl support so..)