From time to time, our ISP's *Nix server misreads the beginning of a php scipt ...
<?php
ini_set( ... etc
... as if it said ...
<?phpini_set( " ... etc
... that is, as if the 0x0d at the end of the tag weren't there.
Oddly, after a few hours, or a few edits to the file, the misbehaviour goes away.
The usual code editor that generated the file is NotePad++.
What's odd is that our site has dozens of PHP scripts, but when this happens, it affects just one script, usually a session_start.php that does nothing more than call ini_set() a couple of times, set a unique session name, then call session_start().
Our hosting folks haven't figured thus out. Anybody have an idea?