Last month PHP 5.4 was recently released to some excitement in the community. Stodgy old man that I am, I was happy to upgrade as soon as possible, but after the installation I found that Microsoft was not quite yet ready with a new set of drivers for SQL Server. So I swapped back to the PHP 5.3 cgi and let time do it's work.
Fast forward a few weeks and I find that all of the pieces have happily produced themselves. Here is a short rundown on installing the newest SQL Server drivers for PHP 5.4: