This post is just a quick notice/warning for everyone wanting to install PEAR (especially on Windows): always download the latest go-pear.phar from http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar.
Before running the famousĀ php -d phar.require_hash=0 go-pear.phar
command, make sure the timestamp of the phar file is somewhere this year. For some reason PHP (and in my case Zend Server CE) always ships with the phar file from 2008…
It will save you a lot of time.