White Screen of death caused by line 250 in template.php "ctype_lower"

Issue is on all 6.x versions of the Zen theme.

Line 250 of template.php in the /zen folder.

if (!ctype_lower($string{0})) { // Don't use ctype_alpha since its locale aware.
$string = 'id' . $string;
}

I commented out this line and my theme began to work perfectly, and not result in the white screen of death on pages beyond the homepage. I am not a php coder so I dont know how critical the line of code is, but I think it requires some investigation as this issue seems to be wide spread. Simply commenting this line of code out works and I have seen no ill effects of it.

This is similar to the bug reported on the main Zen download page.
Note:
There seems to be a conflict between some host installations of the SiteZen site builder and the Zen directory name. If you experience this problem, change the name of the 2 theme directories from "zen" to "Zen" and you should be back in business (i.e. zen/zen becomes Zen/Zen). More about this issue here. http://drupal.org/node/91335

None of these solutions worked for me, such as renaming the theme or changing to capital letter. Also noted, this is my very own servers on SuSE linux 10.01 running Apache/PHP (front end) and MySQL (Backend). I dont have cpanel nor sitebuilder as noted in the noted issue 91335.