Does having a custom php.ini file in Yii app folder cause PDO error?

Hi, I am not new to the forums. I just lost my old email account. I have been working with Yii for about 9 months now.

Anyway, I encountered a strange error after installing a new Yii app this morning. My error is identical to this thread from a few months ago:

http://www.yiiframework.com/forum/index.php/topic/30735-includepdophp-error/

I had a custom php.ini file in the same folder as the new Yii app to enable allow_url_fopen in php. I checked my php.ini file against the php.net docs for setting PDO correctly. I even tried modifying it a bit, but could not get that error to go away. After reading the above thread, I relented, used cURL instead, and deleted the custom php.ini file. Viola, my Yii app stopped throwing the error.

Any reason why? I have included the php.ini file as well, but to the best of my knowledge it is correctly configured for PDO for both MySQL and SQLite.