Wired, wired bug. It happens with Sashin, it happens with phpMailer class, it happens everywhere. As three plugins crashed after each other with the same reason on my brand-new WordPress installation, I’ve decided to invest an evening to find out the reason.

Let us localize the problem at first:

1) It happens only on Win32 installations.

2) It happens only in WordPress 2.1 or earlier.

After debugging a code for a couple of hours, I’ve found a bug with processing a win32 path in plugin_basename() function located in wp-includes/plugin.php.

Now skip the next two paragraphs if you are not a “techi” geek and simply scroll down to the solution.

This bug indirectly leads to the construction of a wrong hookname and to the missing page hook as the result. Missing page hook drives the process in the admin.php on line 44 (release 2.1) to the totally wrong if-branch. Finally this ends up with the attempt to include a plugin file once again.

Solution

Two minutes later I was reading the bug report #4408 which fixed the plugin_basename() in the version 2.2. So there are two options:

1) Upgrade your WordPress to version 2.2. or higher

2) Implement a fix from the bug report.

It is always good to have a choice. Enjoy it.