I see the Deb server I am on has been updated with LibXML2 2.7.3 (half way there! and PHP 5.2.8. Hopefully, PHP will release 5.2.9 soon and this will be a resolved issue.

I saw a couple posts that 5.2.9 would be released around February. It looks like Glowhost updates relatively quickly once things go stable (unlike my prior host where it took them forever to update).