The question is really what Madeleine (particularly) wants, because that include path bug will hit _everybody_. It's just that for win98 users the only 'safe' option this side of it would be 5.2.0 anyway. I know the release process had started for 5.2.1 before win9x support was dropped, but there were a lot of RC's before that release - 5 in all - and I think it actually got chucked out during that cycle. What impact it had, I know less. Might be perfectly safe in CLI, might not. We can't really know without a bunch of testing.
There's also that strcat() bug in 5.2.1 to consider (fixed before 5.2.2)...
- Steph
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=21927 - after some digging on bugs.php.net it appears that the cli is still 95/98 safe (cgi is not)
are we sure the slowness is relative includes? I didn't do any hard benchmarking, just counting seconds to start up between my php-gtk2 apps and the demo. I probably should do a non zts build because it will be faster and the cli doesn't have thread issues anyway...