[eluser]Michael Wales[/eluser]
It's definitely a host thing - most hosts should have short-tags turned on or allow you to turn them on easily. Plus, it sounds like you are having to jump through a lot of hoops to get PHP5 to work. With Dreamhost it's just a click of a radio control within your control panel and on A Small Orange it's an .htaccess option (but it actually works).
"Badly" written is a subjective term. Some people love short-tags and if it's going on a server in which you
know short tags are allowed - they can be great. Any script that is going to be distributed to the public, or you are unsure of the server configuration, you should use long tags (since they will always work).
Back to your issue:
You turned on short tag rewrite and it still didn't work - how about we leave short tag rewrite on and switch to PHP4 (I'm assuming you don't have any PHP5 specific code involved). If it works - great! You can just keep using PHP4 (really, don't fix it unless it's broke, right?). If you are all about using PHP5, I would work with your host - it almost doesn't appear to be a short tag issue any longer and an issue with your server's PHP5 configuration.
