I love Eclipse but I HATE auto-completion with a vengeance! I swear though, no matter how hard I look in prefs or Google I can\'t find where I turn this off!
Well I found how to stop the tags auto-closing. For some reason it's under the Web | HTML Files preferences (even for a PHP file). I realise PHP is embedded in HTML but it seems odd the way the Editor options cross over like this. You need to restart Eclipse for this change to work.