You know what? I'm such a dumby... I was working two days on this PHP code, and for some reason it wasn't connecting right, so I attributed it to the older version of PHP... I thought somehow the PHP 4 had totally different commands, or something, because it just was not working!
In reality, the problem was that I did not add a MySQL user to the database, thus my code was never able to connect to the database. Once I did so, PHP code connected to MySQL just fine, just as I expected. I figured this out after I caught up on some sleep... So I'm attributing it to the lack to sleep... Sorry for opening this topic...