I'm excited, because your advice sorta helped, so, for the rest:

Is there another function that handles certain files like log.txt (i manually set its permission to 666), the files in thumb, the files in src?

Will the script eventually try to delete or change any of these files and run into trouble?

I noticed that the script will try to edit .htaccess (also manually to 666 even though kinda dangerous) when it bans people, are there other files that the script expects to be writeable?

Where does the script put uploaded files before it puts them in src? Could that temporary location be interfering with the script?

The patch you recommended seems to work well, but I am still getting moments where the script dies and then hours later will resurrect itself somehow, whereas before it stayed dead, so this is definitely helping me. I apologize for not finding these things myself, thank you for your help!