Luckily, nothing was actually wrong with the scripts. It ends up that I hadn't configured php.ini correctly, I forgot the little extension_dir variable so it couldn't find the right plugin and therefore couldn't talk to mysql. Though of course, as things have been going, that isn't the end of the problems. Somehow the wrong cookie is being sent back to the client and it isn't able to continue the connection. I bet that I just put in the wrong address in the config.php file, or something small like that. I'm going to tackle the visual studio problem again today because I'd like to have a few more bugfixes in this release, along with updated in-game messages and stuff. So, I'll post back later tonight and see how it goes.
-Mark