mysql_pconnect troubles

[John Griffiths <john@capmon.com>]

hullo all..

i realise that to some extent i'm talking to myself here but i'm hoping at some point someone will jump in and tell me what i'm doing wrong.

running on potato newest versions of apache, php3, mysql, and php3-mysql

I discovered that apacheconfig wasn't working, uncommented the php3 module line myself and restarted apache

so far so good, my "hello world" now works (woohoo)

now i try to use mysql and i get a mysql_pconnect error 

on devshed:
http://www.devshed.com/Books/ProPHP/print.html

i found this:

sql.safe_mode boolean
MySQL has it?s own safe mode. If you set this to TRUE, mysql_connect and mysql_pconnect will ignore any host, user and password information you supply. This means you can only connect to the MySQL database as the user the web server is running as.

could this be the problem?

and if the debian packaged mysql is running in safe mode can someone tell me how to stop it?

or point me at the right doco?

thanks

John