I had written some additional text to the Dreamhost guys and they've been completely useless.

Unfortunately they're big enough to have different people answer each support request and perhaps I'm not big enough to be in a position to have a dedicated account rep. They've given me a free month of service which is hardly any consolation and doesn't begin to cover the amount of money I've lost so far.

I'm in the process of trying to install a custom build of PHP5 right now and just waiting for a script to finish processing. Once I've verified everything is working correctly (fingers crossed I won't be here all night doing this), then I'm going to start to look again for a new host and a dedicated (or at least virtual dedicated) server to hopefully prevent some bullshit move like this in the future and so that I can be in complete control of the server environment.