PHP4.0b2 and DSO

I'm currently having a small problem with PHP4.0b2 and using it as an apache DSO. For some reason when it is compiled as a DSO when I try to start apache (1.3.9) using apachectl start the server dies right away. However, if I rem out the lines telling it load the PHP4 module then start the webserver it start up (sans PHP of course). Then I can go an change the configuration file to load the php module and issue an apachectl restart and php magically loads. I can't figure out why it dies in the first place beacuse nothing is written to the logs. Has anyone else been able to get this to work using DSOs? I'm needing to use DSO's because we use Apache in a production environment for hosting several domains at work and we can't recompile everything each time we need to change a single module. That being said, I'm also new to the list here. I've been running PHP for over a year now on a variety of servers an have implemented a large scale consumer tracking solution using PHP and oracle.