I've changed servers over the weekend, and by now propagation should be complete. The funny thing is that for a moment in the afternoon, the site was apparently broken, since most of the rendering scripts weren't working. I got real worried for a while, until I found the answer: newer installations of PHP (4.2 and on) don't set environment variables as globals.
I have to be one of the worst organized coders around, although I try to make code look organized. The sad true is that most of the core scripts on my blog system were written in a very amateurish style, since I actually learned PHP programming when building this thing. then I patched it over an over again... and well, never took care of certain details, some times I'm just too lazy :)
Nice. That would have saved me quite a few minutes.
Then again, it is always better to comply with best practices, when at all possible. That's what that change in PHP's default installation is encouraging.