I suggest you put your money where your mouth is and show some exampes of the parse errors you say are being generated when you run Zend Guard's syntax-checking abilities against the latest version of ZF. That's the only way to be sure.
Here you go, Zend Guard 4.0.1 is the latest version, php 5 compatible: /usr/local/Zend/ZendGuard-4.0.1/bin/zendenc5 Zend Guard (PHP 5) v4.0.1 (c) Zend Technologies, 1999-2006 /Zend/Request/Interface.php: Interface.php(line 111): parse error, expecting `'&'' or `T_VARIABLE' Encoding of '/Zend/Request/Interface.php' failed. /Controller/Action.php: Action.php(line 92): parse error, expecting `'&'' or `T_VARIABLE' /Zend/Controller/Action.php' failed. Zend/Controller/Action.php: Action.php(line 161): parse error, expecting `'&'' or `T_VARIABLE' /Zend/Controller/Action.php' failed. /Zend/Controller/Router/Interface.php: Interface.php(line 61): parse error, expecting `'&'' or `T_VARIABLE' /Zend/Controller/Router/Interface.php' failed. Zend/Controller/Router.php: Router.php(line 61): parse error, expecting `'&'' or `T_VARIABLE' Encoding of '/Zend/Controller/Router.php' failed. /Zend/Controller/Router.php: Router.php(line 86): parse error, expecting `'&'' or `T_VARIABLE' Encoding of '/Zend/Controller/Router.php' failed. Zend/Controller/Request/Abstract.php: Abstract.php(line 188): parse error, expecting `'&'' or `T_VARIABLE' Zend/Controller/Request/Http.php: Http.php(line 613): parse error, expecting `'&'' or `T_VARIABLE' Zend/Controller/Dispatcher.php: Dispatcher.php(line 88): parse error, expecting `'&'' or `T_VARIABLE' /Zend/Controller/Dispatcher/Interface.php: Interface.php(line 84): parse error, expecting `'&'' or `T_VARIABLE' /Zend/Controller/RewriteRouter.php: RewriteRouter.php(line 63): parse error, expecting `'&'' or `T_VARIABLE'
