I've searched the forums and read the posts. However, I'm not sure that the current thought that memory errors are causing table creation to fail is correct. I'm running WP-MU under phpSuExec with PHP 5.1.4 and I'm not seeing any errors about running out of memory in the server error_log nor the error_log file in the web account root.
I've upped the memory_limit to 32 in php.ini and restarted apache, however when I check phpinfo, I don't even see an entry at all for memory_limit. I then wrote a script like:
$inis = ini_get_all(); print_r($inis);
and it was not listed there, either.
This only happened after I went from 1.0 to 1.1.1. I'm trying to compare the versions to see if I can locate anything obvious, but there's a lot that changed, so it's a bit difficult.
I added some debugging code and I am seeing make_db_current_silent called, but after the first 4 SELECT queries. Adding further code, I looked at $wp_queries and saw it was trying to create wp_1_categories... and this is after switch_blog_id has already been called. $wp_queries does not get updated after switch_blog_id is called, so the table WP is trying to create is not for the new blog and has no effect.