PHP 5.3 BUG: Takes 1 second to connect to local MySQL on Windows

Today I realized that my WAMP setup (windows vista, apache, MySQL, and PHP) was slow because my PHP 5.3 was taking an entire second to connect to a local version of MySQL (5). (The time was actually around 0.99 seconds).

That is crazy!

Replacing it with PHP 5.2.11 got the time back down to a hundredth of a second or less.

I'm using wampserver which made it easy for me to switch to using an older version of PHP.