my approach to custom 404 errors - bypassing error_404.php without hacking or modifying the core

[eluser]CoffeeBeanDesign[/eluser]
I like the simplicity of this method.

It works on my production server, however when I test on Xampp it crashes. Is there some issue with Xampp using readfile to load another page from localhost?? Is this something I should be wary of for production server too??

I have tested readfile on localhost with an external page and all works fine but any readfile("http://localhost... ) causes an Apache crash. file_get_contents on localhost does the same.

Any thoughts??