Failed opening required '(junk)' in...

Hello all, I'm hoping someone may be familiar with the following symptoms... and also some resolution. My hosing provider is clearly struggling with sorting it out. Apologies in advance for the longish message. A virtually (name based) hosted site recently started throwing up errors of the following kind, though I hadn't altered any of the files: Fatal error: Failed opening required '(junk)' in (sometimes_junk) on line (normally 1, otherwise high number) (junk) is normally non/high-ascii glyphs, other times random excerpts from the .htaccess file in the directory. (sometimes_junk) is normally the file called, othertimes '-'. The error recurs randomly, and a reload or five always brings up the page as should be. Here are three real error messages, recently culled, though the junk characters may not come across in email: Fatal error: Failed opening required 'ion/x-httpd-php3' in /home/trisila/sites/orientalstyles.com/html/catalogue.php3 on line 1 Fatal error: Failed opening required 'UD?????' in /home/trisila/sites/orientalstyles.com/html/catalogue.php3 on line 1 Fatal error: Failed opening required 'D????' in - on line 405 The site is at orientalstyles.com I found the following bug-report which sounded similar: http://bugs.php.net/bugs-php3.php?id=3489 and accordingly changed all requires/includes to absolute paths and commented out the php3_include_dir directive in .htaccess. This seemingly reduced the frequency of the error, but by no means eradicated it. Otherwise, all .htaccess contains is 'magic_quotes_gpc off'. Other virtual hosts on the same server (and scripted in a similar manner) are not affected. Ring any bells?? Setup: PHP v3.0.14 Apache: 1.3.11 Linux Kernel: 2.2.14 Config: ./configure '--with-apache=../apache_1.3.11' '--with-mysql=../mysql-3.22.26a-pc-linux-gnu-i686' '--enable-track-vars' '--enable-xml' Many thanks in advance from myself and my, understandably, irate client! Simon