IDE Debug Help

Thank you for letting me lurk on this list for the past year.

I do most of my work in Vim, but use Eclipse plus XDebug when I need to step through code. Unfortunately, I find it to be very fragile. XDebug doesn't like symlinks, and Eclipse's ability to stop at breakpoints disappears if I update anything in my toolchain. I recently broke my environment again, and haven't figured out how to get it functional.

What better options are there?

From the reviews I have read, the Zend debugger doesn't appear any more reliable. Do any of you use it?

Is Netbeans more dependable?

Help. I pretty much wasted the weekend away trying to get an IDE (any IDE) and debugger (any debugger that works) setup for my local Drupal dev environment.

Tried Eclipse (even bought a PackT ebook on the subject) in many forms... PDT, PHPEclipse, others. Tried a couple debug options like Zend, xdebug. The IDEs work to some extent but I really need debugging and have failed on every attempt in that regard. Even tried CodeLobster (very briefly) and NetBeans. Can't get debugging to work in any of these systems. But I think I'm close on several counts.

My dev environment...