plugin activation problems

sorry. this is a re-post. i posted this question a few days ago, but did not receive a response. so i decided to wait for the stable release and see if the problem persisted. well it did. so here is what is happening:

i have looked through the forums and not found this: i have this weird problem with plugins.
when i click to activate one from my admin interface a blank page will load and then nothing. the plugin sometimes will have gotten activated, sometimes not. i then have to open up phpmyadmin and erase all the settings under active_plugin setting to get restarted.

at first i thought this was an issue with my php version. my server is running php 5.?. so i tried running php 4.? via cgi. and for awhile after that the plugins worked fine. i could activate, deactivate them and such. but then the same problem started to re-occur.

then i thought it had to do with the plugin not being written for 1.5 correctly. but the problem even occured with the custom plugin like hello dolly. i can’t seem to make out why and when this problem occurs. i tried activating them in various sequence and such.

the plugins i did try to activate are: get-recent-comments.php, wpPaginate-v2.php and latin-2-utf.php. of these only the last one seems to almost consistently work fine, even though its the oldest one and it does not seem to have been updated to 1.5. with the others it does not seem to matter in which order i activate the plugins, almost like random at some point in my activation order the blank page phenomenon will occur.

the other thing i should say is that this occurs on a “clean” stable release test-install, not after upgrading an earlier version or something.

has anyone had similar problems? and most importantly: found a solution? is there more info from my part needed to adress this question?

ps: i have also noticed that when i delete all non-custominstall plugins from the plugins folder, i still get problems. i try to activate hello dolly, and i do get the confirmation that the plugin got activated, however the plugin does not appear to be active, neither on the list of plugins nor in its functionality eg no hello dolly lyrics appearing anywhere. what might be going wrong here?

and why is no one responding to my question?