New from the rooJSolutions blog there's a post pointing out an issue that PHP 5.3.7 has broken the is_a functionality in a lot of cases. The post talks some about what's broken and how you can work around it if you're effected.

The key issue was that 5.3.7 accidentally broke is_a() for a reasonably large number of users. Unfortunately the fixup release 5.3.8 did not address this 'mistake', and after a rather fruitless exchange I gave up trying to persuade the group (most people on mailing list), that reverting the change was rather critical (at least pierre supported reverting it in the 5.3.* series).

This new issue was causing some strange errors to pop up in his code because of a parameter type change in the is_a call, updating the first parameter to be an object instead of a class name. The is_a() call sends its requests to __autoload in some cases and the string->object mismatch of those parameters causes errors to be thrown. His workaround is, in your checking, just be sure to call an is_object first before passing things off to be is_a() checked and autoloaded.