Trouble with accessing the dashboard!!!

Hello, (Originally posted in the how to and troubleshooting category, but I think this is an installation problem so I’ve posted it here)

I’m new to blogging and wordpress, and have just installed it on my web server… wordpress that is :o).

Anyway, during the installation process… after I’d entered a title for my blog and email address, then logged in with the password the installation process gave me, I got this error (this error is only displayed on the dashboard)…

Parse error: parse error, unexpected $, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /hsphere/local/home/constine/tiffanylampworld.com/blog/wp-includes/class-snoopy.php on line 656

This is line 656…
function _stripform($document)
I haven’t changed class-snoopy.php at all.

The only other bit of information I can give you is upon editing the wp-config.php file, for the line that looks like this…

define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

I had to change localhost to mysql9.hostexcellence.com, because when I first went to run install.php I got an error saying something like it couldn’t connect to my database, or my database server was down. So I switched localhost to my databases host name… which is mysql9.hostexcellence.com and the error went away!

Does anyone know how I can resolve this error? As it’s a strange one as a parse error indicates there’s some type of typo in class-snoopy.php, but that can’t be! Because the file is the file I unziped for wordpress download! Confused I am! Help I need!

Thanks in advance.

Nadia.