Aspell + PHP + Windows was giving me just crazy crashes with this simple test file:
<?php
$pspell_link = pspell_new("en");
?>
Running "php -f test.php" directly from a DOS prompt shed some light:
----------------
The file "C:\Program Files\Aspell\data/iso8859-1.dat" can not be opened for reading.pell\dict/en-only.rws:
----------------
To fix it I needed to "dos2unix" all the files in Aspell's C:\Program Files\Aspell\data\ directory. (Convert them from CRLF to just LF line endings).