My home system has a version of PHP compiled with the SOAP extension. The live system has a version of PHP without the SOAP extension, and most of the scripts rely on the NuSOAP library quite heavily. The fact that NuSOAP and the SOAP extension use the same names for their classes is a terrible headache.
How can I disable the SOAP extension on my home system without doing a reinstall / recompile? It's compiled in, and not enabled by a extension directive in a ini file.
it's an extension, so you can disable it in php.ini. Just outcomment the line. Remember to restart Apache afterwards.
I have found nusoap to be rather buggy, so upgrading to native soap should be a priority. If this isn't immediately possible, it would be a good idea to switch to nusoap-for-php5, since it allows you to run both the native soap extension and nusoap alongside. You can then implement new code against native soap, while still using nusoap for legacy code.