Quanta crash upon PHP file open when including specific file

Howdy folks.  I have searched quite a but to find an answer to the following 
questions but if this is covered in a FAQ or bug post somewhere please let me 
know where and I will keep the signal to noise ration down.

I am currently running Kubuntu 9.10 which means Quanta 3.5.10 under KDE 4.

I use Quanta mainly for PHP based web development and I recently picked up 
some work modding an existing codebase.  As is my usual process, after 
downloading a site backup I created a new project and then rescanned the 
working directory to create the initial file listing.  Upon opening one of the 
site files,  Quanta got as far as showing the initial script content 
(highlighted) and then promptly crashed. 

After some tedious trial and error I believe I have isolated the file that 
causes the crash.  The behaviour though is strange.

I can open the problematic file itself ("functions.php") and not have Quanta 
crash.  However, it will crash if I create a file that includes it - so the 
following code crashes Quanta:

<?php

include 'functions.php';

?>

If I run Quanta from the command line I get no useful details (presumably at 
least partially because of the distro's choice of compile options and KDE4 not 
being fully baked):

$ quanta logEdit.php
kbuildsycoca running...
DCOP Cleaning up dead connections.
KCrash: Application 'quanta' crashing...
Could not find 'drkonqi' executable.
KCrash cannot reach kdeinit, launching directly.

I tried viewing functions.php in a hex editor to see if there was any 
character set details in the file but it appears to be 7 bit ASCII as far I can 
see.  vi set to show non printing characters also shows nothing unusual.  The 
code in it is not pretty but is syntactically OK as far as PHP is concerned 
(php -l gives no errors).

In any case, does anyone have any suggestions on what to do here to try to find 
the source of the problem and fix it?  

As a workaround, is there any way to stop Quanta from processing PHP file 
includes without losing code high lighting?

Any assistance much appreciated.

Cheers

-- 
:: Will code PHP for food!
:: http://codegrunt.com