[imp] mysterious spell check problem

[Liam Hoekenga]

So, i'm trying to debug a problem that's on our test machine, but not  
our development machine.

in dev, spell check works in IMP

on test, we get..
Apr 18 11:12:07 HORDE [error] [imp] spellcheck failed:  [pid 8926 on  
line 103 of  
"/usr/local/projects/webmail/html-ssl/horde/imp/lib/Imple/SpellChecker.php"]

same php, same php.ini, same version of pear, some horde installation
aspell is on the test machine, does work from the command line

any ideas?

liam