Status Report erroneously displays "No Solr instance available"

Environment: Drupal 5.7, Solr 1.2 (2008.07.10)

Issue: Drupal Status Report displays "No Solr instance is available" even though Solr is running and can be accessed through Solr admin interface.

Additional information:

Verified that the php.ini directive allow_url_fopen is enabled and also that the apachesolr module schema is in place. After enabling PHP logging, I noticed that the following warning message appears in the log file three times (once each for lines 217, 220, and 88) when hitting the Drupal status report page:

PHP Warning: Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated - argument passed by value; If you would like to pass it by reference, modify the declaration of module_invoke_all(). If you would like to enable call-time pass-by-reference, you can set allow_call_time_pass_reference to true in your INI file. However, future versions may not support this any longer. in /var/www/icons/modules/apachesolr/apachesolr.module on line 217

As mentioned, this error is replicated also for lines 220 and 88.

I noticed and applied the call_time-reference patch (http://drupal.org/node/270692), but that did not resolve the issue.

enabling the php.ini directive "allow_call_time_pass_reference" as per the error message does suppress the message in the error log, but does not fix the core issue of the status report not seeing the solr instance.

Any thoughts, workarounds or fixes would be appreciated. At this point, I'm stuck.

Thanks,
Randy