[dnanian]

Yes, that's definitely why. And you can certainly share the databases without MySQL -- just find the folder where the data is, and share it.

Installing PHP would only happen on the Sandbox. We only share applications in /Applications, not the stuff that's considered to be part of "the system", and PHP is definitely part of that.

There are a lot of Terminal-level tools to locate files, including "find". Not quite sure what you mean about symlinks, though -- you can check to see if a folder has symlinks in it with "ls -l" -- the link will show what the file is, and what it points to. But it doesn't work for aliases...