FreeTDS 0.8x Hangs Using PHP 5.2.x odbc_exec(), 0.63 Works

I've discovered what appears to be a similar finding from others that 0.8x 
series of FreeTDS hangs using v7.0 of the TDS protocol against SQL Server 7.0, 
but when I downgrade to FreeTDS 0.63, everything works clean as a whistle.

I've tried 0.82 and freetds-0.83.dev.20100112 - both of which hang.

The OS is OpenSuSE 11.2, 32-bit using unixODBC v2.2.12 (the default package 
that comes in the repository).

Heads Up:  I've got things working the way I need them to be for now, but I 
will provide traces here over the weekend.