Problem with files

I am using a suggested "image gallery" script from Zend tutorial. I have thrown out most of the stuff from the script, just keeping the basics, to seee if it works. I request a file name in a form, via an <INUT TYPE="file"... tag. I send that name to another script, and open the file. Then I take chunks of 8K and read them using fread(). What happens is that fread() encounters a byte value of 26, which represents EOF marker and simply stops reading. It drives me nuts! This is all happening on Win98SE, Apache 3.1.14 and PHP 4 (I can't remember the exact version number and am too lasy to find out :-)) ) Anyway, this reminds me of binary safe reading issues... Is there some way to tell PHP to read the chunk I told it to and just keep it's oppinions about what it read to itself? Thanx :-) -Mladen