Set_time_limit trouble

hi all, i don't know if i have already asked you about this, but i guess not. here's my trouble. On one of our application on Lycos Portals, we have a script that makes an fsockopen on an external server that checks out credit cards and stuff. That server only checks one card at a time, so if i have 5 clients clicking on 'check' at the 'same' time, they will be queued and treated in order. The trouble is, even though i have set_time_limit(0) at the beginning of my script (and i'm not in safe_mode), if the server takes more than 30 seconds to send an answer back on the socket, the script dies from hitting max_execution_time. I have found out that printing anything before the fsockopen() stops that behavior but i can't use that trick cause i need to use a header() function depending on the result of the server. Of course i could use output buffering to be able to write an echo and still use header() but that's a hack and not a solution to what could be a bigger problem here. This is on php 4.0.6 (not patched like the one i patch for the members' use. This is for Portals). Anyone got a rough idea of what could happen and how i could solve this problem ? It's getting more and more annoying for us since we get more and more clients and the credit card checkin' server queues more and more .. Is it a 4.0.6 known bug solved in later versions ? Thanks for any insight. Later Chand