If anyone stumbles across this post or is having similar problems in the future, I finally figured out a solution to the issue, though I'm not sure how universal it might be.

This from the PHP guru at my hosting company:

"PHP is sometimes completely idiotic. It sometimes throws open_basedir errors (ahem) erroneously. Bugs have been filed, nothing comes of it. I do not have the highest opinion of PHP."

So there you have it. Nothing he was able to do, really.

HOWEVER... The server I'm on happens also to provide the option of running PHP scripts as CGI's. I don't know how common of a feature that is, or if there is any kind of standard implementation. But in my case it was as simple as adding a .htaccess file to my links cgi-bin directory with the line:

AddType php-cgi .php

This basically tells Apache to run all php scripts in that directory (of which there is only one - page.php) as cgi's, outside of Apache. The open_basedir settings which were causing such headaches are no longer needed, since the script has my user permissions, not Apache's permissions.

Anyway, so far so good - this appears to have solved the problem completely.

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