Today, the bugfix-release 5.2.4 of PHP has been released.
This is an interesting release, because it includes my fix for bug 42117 which I discovered and fixed a couple of weeks ago.
This means that with PHP 5.2.4 I will finally be able to bzip2-encode data as it is generated on the server and stream it out to the client, greatly speeding up our windows client.
Now I only need to wait for the updated gentoo package to update our servers.