Somehow along the way the way php returns errors when the display_errors flag is set to 'off' changed, causing me so much confusion! At first I thought it was siolated to ZendServer, but it is somewhere along php 5.2.12 that it was implemented.
So, for those developers having a rough time debugging in a development enviroment, such as using ZendServerCE on windows, make sure you enable the display_errors option in the server's php.ini.
Happy Debugging!