Curl Problems

[eluser]Aea[/eluser]
I know, this isn't CI directed, but I need to use curl for the application I'm developing, and unfortunately I don't think it particularly likes me...

Generic Example

Code:

<?php
   $curl = curl_init();
   curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.php.net");
   curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
   curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);

   curl_exec ($curl);
   curl_close ($curl);
?>

The result should be...

* About to connect() to www.php.net:80
...

But instead I'm getting absolutely nothing printed out, when in my full script I tried to use curl_errno($handler) I got 0 returned everytime, even when the result should have been a 404.

I'm utterly confused as to why curl isn't working properly, is there a php.ini option which is impeding this? I've tried doing it without CI as the back end and the result is identical. Any insights would be highly appreciated