PHP, Pear, pspell and a core dump

I’ve been getting core dumps from HTTPD since doing an update which included PHP. This happened to me before and I thought I’d try the same solution again, but it didn’t work. Pear was due an update portupgrade -ra would get to the update and error out. Attempting manually force it was a dead end:
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Console_Getopt-1.2.2
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Structures_Graph-1.0.2
*** Signal 11

Couldn’t find any help on pear.php.net except to say it was a PHP problem. That seemed more likely when I found that
# php -v
yielded
segmentation fault (core dumped)

Many fingers point to ZEND, and a few to recode.so but one pointed to pspell.so

I deleted that line from my .../etc/php/extensions.ini and voila:

claudel# php -v
PHP 5.2.5 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2 (cli) (built: Apr 5 2008 16:51:20)
Copyright (c) 1997-2007 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2007 Zend Technologies

I recompiled all the whole PHP dependency tree with -O2 and still it works fine and I could update pear right to 1.7.1