Do you have short open tags allowed in this server setting?
why not just do
<?php
print $_REQUEST["result"];
?>
Yes, short open tags are allowed on this server. As mentioned before, all instances of this app are running on the same server, using the same configuration etc. Differences between the problem app and the other apps are the number of files (and megabytes) and number of db-records, which are both a lot more than in the other apps.
Tried to use your idea, but it doesn't solve the problem...