When configuring Drupal 6 on our LAMP server, occassionally after entering the the database information on the Database Configuration screen, once submitted the interface simply return to the same database configuration screen with no errors - very frustrating.

All permissions appeared to be correct in our setup and we received no messages indicating otherwise.

The solution was to edit the settings.php file manually. Specifically the line:
$db_url = ‘mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename’;

We used the simpliepie library to access the Twitter API recently and ran in to an issue trying to access the image link field from the XML.

This is the image link that gives you a direct link to the twitter users profile picture.

Using the get_link() function would only return the link to the users profile. After reading the API manual we used:

<?php echo $item->get_link(0, 'image'); >

And our problem was solved.