mysqli unclonable object

On a Fedora 4 machine running MySQL 4.1 I am having trouble declaring an instance of a mysqli extension. class Data extends mysqli { function __construct($host, $user, $password, $db = null) { @parent::__construct($host, $user, $password, $db) or printf("There was an error (id: %d) connecting to the database: <b>%s</b><br />", mysqli_connect_errno(), mysqli_connect_error()); } .... } $link = new Data("localhost", "user", "password", "db"); This invokes the error "Trying to clone unclonable object of type Data." However if I create the link with a reference ... $link =& new Data(....); ...everything works fine. This error is interesting because it only occurs on the machine mentioned above, in a Windows/MySQL 5.0 environment, everything works fine without the reference. Thanks in advance! Matt