Forum parse errors on multiple install attempts
 

I have just purchased a new forum license for vBulletin for a new site I'm building. I've worked with vBulletin before and have installed it multiple times, but have never run into this problem.

I'm hosted on webmasters. The PHP version is 5.2.5 and the MySQL version is 5.1.40.

I first downloaded and attempted to install 4.0.0 on a clean database to a new site that has never hosted a vBulletin install. It seemed to work, but when I logged into the control panel I had only one box with a "*[]*" where the menus should have been on the left. I uploaded the tools.php file to troubleshoot and got my first parse error.

I researched it and found that perhaps the install was seeing PHP 4 rather than PHP 5. I verified everything through the control panel and everything was set to run on PHP 5, so I dumped all the database tables, re-uploaded all the files and tried again. This time I got parse errors during the install.

I contacted webmasters to verify that there wasn't any problem with the PHP 5 settings that would prevent the install. I have a wordpress install on this same domain on a different database, and that is using PHP 5 as well, so I figured that probably wasn't it, but had them verify just to be sure. Everything looks good. I even added a line to the .htaccess file to make 100% sure it was forced to look at PHP 5.

Finally I decided to dump the database again and try installing 3.8.5. I downloaded that and tried the install. Parse errors again. So now I am stumped.

The error I get is on step 3 of the install and looks like this:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING, expecting ')' in /usr/local/4admin/apache/vhosts/***.com/addon/***.com/forum/includes/functions_misc.php on line 284

On the various installs I have gotten past this point on some, only to be hit with similar errors further in the process. Any ideas???