I was able to use this workaround:
    $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] =
    substr($_SERVER['PATH_TRANSLATED'],
       strlen($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']));
    if (substr($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'], 0, 2) == '//') {
       $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] =
            substr($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'], 1);
    }
to fix an invalid PHP_SELF on Solaris 2.7
Sparc, PHP 4.3.0 .

Simply doing phpinfo(); and then appending the value of
PHP_SELF onto an 'ls ' statement yielded "no such file".

The file did not exist:

$ ls /~russ/tryseed/showSeed.phtml
/~russ/tryseed/showSeed.phtml: No such file or directory

The clue here is this: I was running out
of a "pubic_html" subdirectory off of ~russ (see above).
The URL typed into IE 5.2 (Mac OS X) was:

"http://hostname/~russ/tryseed/showSeed.html"

** I have other pages on same web server, same PHP which
are hosted out of the server's normal root directory
and they don't have this problem. **

--Thank you to whoever came up with that workaround above.
I just put similar text as a COMMENT on a CLOSED linux 
Bug #21261.  This needs to be considered OPEN AFAIK.