My daily PHP frustration - I

I couldn't get Xdebug to work. I spent more than 12 hours on it. It just didn't work. I suspect the problem is related to compatibility between the versions of PHP and Xdebug. There was no clear error message, so I can't tell. As for clients, I tried a number of them. Take a look at the list here. The Eclipse PDT plug-in - and most of the clients actually - seem to assume that you browse a PHP page directly. That was not my case: I would browse a page that had an Ajax call to PHP. The Notepad++ and the XDebugClient (stand-alone) were the most promising ones. But if it worked on Eclipse, I would stay within the IDE.