Ok.. I think we isolated the problem. The commas in the query string must cause the problem. I did 2 separate tests. I rigged the testing.php document to access
http://www.mydomain.com/index.php (in index.php is a script that will reformulate the URL and give the initial parameters for that page and redirect with the header directive to the URL that has all the comma stuff behind it. When I try to spider testing.php it works. It is spidering the page correctly.
Then I did another test and I replaced the URL that I want to fopen with the actual URL of index.php, the one with the query string and commas behind it. The page seems to load just fine.
When I try to spider testing.php that way it indexes in 42 seconds. Isn't that interesting. If I set up a page ... testing.php, that fopens the url with the dis=1,1,1,1,0.... and try to spider testing.php it works, however when I try to spider the URL directly with PhpDig it stalls.
I did apply all the other changes per your instruction. Still no luck.
Mr. L