<p>What are some reasons why PHP would force errors to show, no matter what you tell it to disable?</p>

<p>I have tried </p>

<pre><code>error_reporting(0);
ini_set('display_errors', 0); 
</code></pre>

<p>with no luck.</p>

Note the caveat in the manual at
http://uk.php.net/error_reporting
:
Most of E_STRICT errors are evaluated at the compile time thus such errors are not reported in the file where error_reporting is enhanced to include E_STRICT errors (and vice versa).
If your underlying system is configured to report E_STRICT errors, these may be output before your code is even considered. Don't forget, error_reporting/ini_set are runtime evaluations, and anything performed in a "before-run" phase will not see their effects.
Based on your comment that your error is...
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_VARIABLE, expecting ',' or ';' in /usr/home/REDACTED/public_html/dev.php on line 11
Then the same general concept applies. Your code is never run, as it is syntactically invalid (you forgot a ';'). Therefore, your change of error reporting is never encountered.
Fixing this requires a change of the system level error reporting. For example, on Apache you may be able to place...
php_value error_reporting 0
in a .htaccess file to suppress them all, but this is system configuration dependent.
Pragmatically, don't write files with syntax errors :)