Quote Originally Posted by mikebackhouse View Post
... it became apparent that IIS wouldnt work with mysql etc..
I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. In its default configuration, installing PHP and the PHP connector for MySQL should make MySQL available to PHP, which in turn allows PHP scripts running from IIS to be able to access the database fine.
Granted, if you've got something else amuck, maybe that's interfering with the normal operation in additional ways also.