Incomplete page display problem

[tired]

I am developing a web site that will be used for e-commerce (http://www.funandfunkygifts.com/fun/). I am using the www.osCommerce.com engine and I am experiencing very strange behavior under DIFFERENT browsers and different machines.

 

The index.php page does not load completely: the browser says "Done" but actually the HTML code that arrived is truncated. Truncation happens always at the same point (the page's source ends in the middle of a <td> tag).

 

If I refresh the page, sometimes it loads OK, sometimes it doesn't. Also, sometimes the page loads perfectly the first time and gets screwed up when refreshed. The behavior is completely unpredictable.

 

I have developed the code on my home PC (Win XP with IIS 5.1, PHP 4.3.11) and it runs flawlessly. The deployment server (on which the problem occurs) is a Linux machine with Apache and PHP 4.1.2-7.0.1 Debian. There are also other PHP pages hosted on this server and they work perfectly.

 

Even though MySQL queries on the server take longer than on my machine (I have measured the page parsing times), PHP script timeout is

NOT exceeded.

 

Does anybody have any idea what might be causing the problem? I am looking for a solution that doesn't involve upgrading the PHP engine on the server.

 

Thanks

 

P.S.

 

I have found a somewhat similar problem on the forum at http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=38936&hl=. Does anyone have a solution that's different from the one listed there (installing a newer version of PHP) by any chance?