Thank you Tom & co. for your most helpful suggestions.
If I may, I'll give a quick resume of my "adventure":
In trying to debug this upgrade from php4 to php5 and postgresql 7.4 to 8.3 I have learned much.
First trying to set up various debuggers like PHPed, Eclipse with phpeclipse, DEBUG and XDEBG is generally a horrendous nightmare.
After reading all I could find and trying all suggestions and instructions, I found that the DBGbar plugin for Firefox found the errors far better than all the others; it got as far as the login page which normally comes up when the user is anonymous from the $sid
I did finally manage to set up XDebug - but not the way of the instructions: use only the zend_extension=/where/the/file/is/xdebug.so the php.ini file. The extensions.ini file should have any & all dbg.so, dbg.so.x.x.x and xdebug.so commented out or just out for xdebug to be loaded as an xdebug extension and a zend_extension.
I just could not get phpeclipse to work right; kept getting errors for include files (= no such file at .:/usr/local/share/pear) And PHPed as I tried it just mucked up the files. Luckily I had made copies. :)
But, I must say, Eclipse seems like a great tool to program in java.

Apparently, the programmers used tcl functions like pg_exec to work with postgresql and it works fine in pg7.4 but not in 8.3.
What could I do to either link or use the tcl commands as it would seem that rewriting all the instances of these instructions might just be too much to bother?

Thanks in advance.
Philip



Tom Lane wrote: 
PJ <af.gourmet@videotron.ca> writes:
  
Normally, accessing the test site the main page should come up without
a login based on the sid&nbsp; ($sid) which should come from a cookie. But
it looks like on this newer server there is no cookie set for, if it
were, then the opening page should come up. From the log output I might
think that the error is in the formatting of the null string $sid=' ' .
This I am not sure of. <br>
    

What it's complaining about is the places where an inet value is
assigned or compared with an empty string.  I'm quite certain that
that didn't work in 7.3 either, though, so I'm a bit baffled how
your application ever worked at all.  You should go look at where
the app is getting its IP addresses from.  Maybe it is trying to
parse them out of some log output or something that has changed
format since 7.3?

			regards, tom lane