Zen cart Configuration and Email Options or Transport Not Showing

I thought I'd post this, since it just took up the last few hours of my day trying to figure it out.

The problem was that in my zencart installation on a windows machine I was getting nothing displayed when I clicked on any of the options in the configuration section of the admin panel.

Eventually, I found a fix at the strangest of places. I found the following line in "admin\configuration.php"

$configuration = $db->Execute("select configuration_id, configuration_title, configuration_value, configuration_key,
use_function from " . TABLE_CONFIGURATION . "
where configuration_group_id = '" . (int)$gID . "'
order by sort_order");

Then changed it to:

$configuration = $db->Execute("select configuration_id, configuration_title, configuration_value, configuration_key,
use_function from " . TABLE_CONFIGURATION . "
where trim(configuration_group_id) = '" . (int)$gID . "'
order by sort_order");


As you may notice, I used a trim function on the trim(configuration_group_id) then everything worked fine.
It seems that the mysql version that I am using might not be the smoothest to use for zencart, but all is working for now. So I will see how things go.