Ok, I have done LOTS of digging on this problem, and it always points back to the bind address. Literally, there's nothing on the web that says anything other than that. And, if you do a search on the error, you end up seeing zillions of sites that have had the same problem, (like showing the error because they're broken) not zillions of solutions.
Well for me, setting to 127.0.0.1 or localhost wasn't an option because I had multiple servers connecting to it. I had to bind it to a specific nic, or to the hostname assigned to it.
It was crazy, I could connect to the host with navicat, mysql server admin, and even by hand through a terminal window, but the @$)#%#$ php zend driven pages just kept constantly throwing that error.
As it turns out, it was a PHP problem, specifically in how we configured Zend. Basically, we pushed straight from MAMP and swapped out the the variables to what we were using on the main server.
Our dev config looks like so.
$mainDBConfig = array (
-'databaseWW' => array(
--'adapter' => 'pdo_mysql',
---'params'=> array(
---'host'=>'localhost',
---'username'=>'root',
---'password'=>'root',
---'port'=>'8889',
---'dbname'=> 'mydb')));
So see that 'port' thing? If you're already on port 3036 TAKE THAT LINE OUT. Zend defaults to 3036. As soon as I took it out, it worked like a charm, bound to the hostname, not the IP address by the way.
I'd file a bug with zend if I knew how to do it, but I think this is the place everybody who has this problem is going to read this fix. I read this thread at least a hundred times trying to figure it out myself.
Good luck all!!!!!!!!!! Drop me an email if you fix it the same way. I'd like to at least know if one person has the same problem I did.
tony.fraser@gmail.com
tf