Installing and upgrading help

You wrote "cron playing havoc if cron.php is not owned by user apache".
Hi
About:
>> cron playing havoc if cron.php is not owned by user apache
> Did you mean config.php, and not cron.php?
You are right. That was a "typo".

> It is strange though, that the cron.php can do cause bad things to happen. Its top few php lines are
>
> ...
>
> So it should just fatally abort when the require of the config.php fails.....
>
> I'm puzzled.

Why? config.php contain critical information for cron.php to run.