All my problems stemmed from trying to get mcrypt for PHP installed. Last night I gave in and followed a tutorial of how to do a totally fresh apache2 and php5.3.3 install. I did this using macports
Sadly, that didn't enable mcrypt for me last night, although I was pretty pleased that I got 5.3.3 running :)
The problem is that I have woken up this morning to find that my php version is back down to 5.3.1 which can only mean that OS X has reverted to my original Apache and PHP.
How to I tell OS X to use the software I installed via macports?
(And then I will ask a new question of how to enable mcrypt)
n.b. I can get the macports install to load by stopping the current web sharing in system prefs then this in terminal
sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl -k restart
/etc/init.d
. Somewhere there is probably a line that starts/calls/usr/sbin/apachectl
. Comment that out and replace it with the call to apache2.