So I understand correctly that you solve it then? :-) If you post anything that might be helpful to others let us know and we put a link on one of the user guide article where it seems fitting.

Yep, it's been 10 hours and everything is owned by the user, cache is running perfectly, and it's magic. The catch is you need root access to fix DSO/mod_php, but it's pretty rare on shared, so I think only a VPS/dedi would use it

Since most will use ZP on normal shared hosts they also mostly won't be able to do anything like that. All shared hosts I know do work fine, with the one or other quibble at times ;-)

Irony?

When this site was originally built (and I'm about to date myself...) all most people used WAS mod_php on shared. We didn't have a lot of sustainable options. Which is why this is not something I'm [i]horribly[/i] concerned over. I mean, for most people, even on shared, the solution is "move to a different PHP processor." The only reason I didn't was that it would require a MASSIVE amount of work to rebuild apache with the right add-ons.