phpMyAdmin glitch after upgrading

[Ted Roche]

I've run into some trouble after upgrading a working phpMyAdmin  
installation, and would appreciate some pointers on how to troubleshoot  
it.

Running FC2 with nightly yum updates, Apache 2.0.51, PHP 4.3.8 and  
MySQL 3.23.58.

I've just upgraded my phpMyAdmin installation to the latest 2.60.0-pl2  
version, to avoid a security problem with the 2.57.something I was  
running. Now I've got a problem. While I can log in and see most of the  
top-level forms showing databases and tables, when I drill into table  
structures or browses, I end up with nearly blank forms: the frames are  
there, the left frame of navigation and the breadcrumb trail ("Server:  
myserver.com > Database: test > Table: item) but nothing else appears  
in the right frame. Normally, I would expect to see a browse form and  
some controls for changing the table structure or field values.

I am seeing the behavior on Mac OS X 10.3.5 client with Safari or  
Camino, as well as Win XP Pro client with FireFox or IE, so it doesn't  
seem browser-specific. The "breadcrumb trail" in the right pane is  
wrapped inside <table> ...</table> tags, and there's no further HTML or  
</html> in the frame, so I suspect the routine is terminating  
abnormally. I'm just not sure how to troubleshoot from there.

I had tried to turn PHP safemode on, but have reset it to off (and  
restarted httpd a few dozen times). No change

I've changed all the php scripts to chown -R apache.apache as part of  
the attempt to get safe mode working. No change.

The user I am logging in as has full rights across the database. I'm  
using the http authentication mode built into phpMyAdmin. The  
'controluser' has very limited rights to the database as described in  
the install instructions.  I've diffed the config.inc.php against the  
stock one supplied and have only the minimal changes specifed in the  
install document.

I've reviewed the install instructions at http://www.phpmyadmin.net and  
posted a message to the phpMyAdmin forum on SourceForge  
(https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php? 
thread_id=1163606&forum_id=72909) without getting a useful response  
yet.

If anyone is familiar with phpMyAdmin specifically, or has some ideas  
for troubleshooting this problem in general, I'd welcome suggestions.

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com