Running Server 2008 - After following all of the normal install guides for PHP 5.3.3, I kept running across an error where the page would hang for about 60 seconds, and then give me a database connection issue. Strange indeed!

After struggling with this for a while, I came across an enlightening blog post that had a simple fix: remove the IPv6 definition for localhost, and everything was magical and happy and wonderful.

Open up your host file at c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts, and comment out ::1 localhost so it looks like

127.0.0.1 localhost
#::1 localhost

And problem solved.