Development environment

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?