Programs not Running - SOLVED

Dear List - Thanks to all for your help. The problem was in this piece of code:

        require '/var/www/pass.inc';
        $db = "Store";
        $cxn = mysqli_connect($host,$user,$password,$db);
        if ( !$cxn ) {
          die( 'connect error: '.mysqli_connect_error() );
            }

I had moved the password file [/var/www/pass.inc] out of root, but forgot to change the code! This still leaves a question:

        if ( !$cxn ) {
          die( 'connect error: '.mysqli_connect_error() );
            }

Why did the above code catch the error?? Ethan