Well I have been trying to get my Virtual server running on Virtualbox and hit across the problem of "sockets not connecting" whenever trying to run an email method.

My custom CMS uses gmail to route mail through, so I really should have seen the problem straight away, but for those that also use a gmail setup to send email from their scripts, "Could not connect to socket" actually means.

"You dont have OpenSSL installed dummy!"

So I installed OpenSSL and its all running nicely.