I'm implementing this on a site for a client. Worked fine on my dev box after I made the changes in my previously submitted patch. Moved it to the live environment and started getting error messages / white screen of death. Tried upping the memory limit, etc. Nothing worked.

I noticed that the production hosting environment was running 4.4.2, and my dev environment is running 5.2.1. Upgraded the production environment and everything worked like a charm. Something in the code is causing Drupal to freak out when run in PHP 4. As I am but a humble web developer who is just learning Drupal and the bug seems to be a non-issue in PHP 5, I shall defer this bug to someone else.