To ~lbessant and “guru” . Have the same problem. Installation OK, MySQL tables OK, wp-login does not pass. Log analysis shows the crap like n4c stated above. wp-config is OK, its ANSI, php tags OK, no spaces.
What happened? By the way I installed WP on the same server 50 days ago – there were no problems. Server configuration did not changed. May be distribution is guilty?