PHP 5.3 and MySQL timeouts

On my dev machine, WinXP SP3, I had PHP 5.2 configured with IIS 5.1 and MySQL 5. Recently upgraded to PHP 5.3  and whooops.. most of my applications stop working.. :?  first the ISAPI was discontinued so I had to go the FastCGI way but for some reason I just could not make it work. The browser will just offer me to download/ save the file. As I was in a hurry I thought $#@*& IIS, lets try Apache. Installed and configured Apache with PHP and the phpinfo page works fine but pages with MySQL connection will still not load... after wasting sometime trying to figure out what was wrong, went to the doorstep of all knowing Google.. and found this