Jeremy--your second guess wins the prize!
I guess it's only right that I should have to beat my head against the wall for a while but what's weird is that I've been running scripts on another server for a long time and those didn't give me this trouble. Guess I must have the permissions right on those, eh?

What's weird though, is that the owner is "nobody", the httpd runs as user "nobody" and the permissions on the file were 744. Guess when you access the file with a browser Apache treats the user as not the owner and not a member of the group but puts them in the set "other"?
Oh well. At least it is FIXED!!!
Muchos Gracias.. Now I can take a siesta and tomorrow... GUI access to mySQL!