I've been testing with PayPal sandbox on my Windows Vista machine.
It is running Apache/2.0.59 (Win32) PHP/5.2.12
My php is installed in c:\php5 yours could be in c:\php

My goal was to use fsockopen with "ssl://" stream but I was receiving this error:

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to ssl://www.sandbox.paypal.com:443 (Unable to find the socket transport "ssl" - did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?)

My Solution

1. I had to enable: php_openssl.dll from php.ini

extension=php_openssl.dll

2. I also made sure that extension_dir points to my extension directory, not the default ./ location.

extension_dir = "c:/php5/ext"

3. I found the comment of mtudor AT icefusion DOT co uk very valuable.
I renamed these 2 files so the same files are loaded from c:\php5

C:\Apache2\bin\ssleay32.dll => old-ssleay32.dll
C:\Apache2\bin\ssleay32.dll => old-libeay32.dll

If everything is OK your phpinfo(); should list these stream socket transports

Registered Stream Socket Transports     tcp, udp, ssl, sslv3, sslv2, tls

Related

• http://www.php.net/manual/en/openssl.installation.php
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1705856/socket-transport-ssl-in-php-not-enabled

Good luck!
Svetoslav