when I set the E-Mail Transport method to PHP I get this error when I complete an order ...

2013 Lost connection to MySQL server during query
in:
[select customers_email_format from newsite_customers where customers_email_address= '[email protected]']

2006 MySQL server has gone away
in:
[select count(*) as total from newsite_sessions where sesskey = 'XXXXXXX']

any ideas??