Sporadic MSSQL connection error

Hi I'm having a sporadic connection problem with MSSQL. I have a php script which is called by a folder scanning application and sometimes it can run for hours without problem but other times it will run for just a few minutes and return connection errors. I tried using mssql_get_last_message but it always seems to return an empty string. I'd like to find out why the connection is failing but in the absense of error info from MSSQL, it's a bit problematic. Is there a creative way to actually get error strings back from MSSQL in light of the fact that mssql_get_last_message basically does squat? As a last ditch effort, I could run the connect line in a loop a set number of times until it succeeds but I would prefer to know why it fails. Can anyone offer suggestions? Thanks Ken