After hours of trying everything thinkable, even using native PDO functions I found the redeeming sentence in a PHP doc comment:
"If you receive an error while trying to write to a sqlite database (update, delete, drop): Warning: PDO::query() [function.query]: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1 unable to open database The folder that houses the database file must be writeable." Setting the folder's access rights properly is the solution. Kind regards Michel Feldheim
