checking for existance of a table.

[turnipofdoom]

In a mod I am writing I use this query:

SELECT count(*) cnt
	FROM information_schema.tables
	WHERE table_schema = '$db_tmp_name'
AND table_name = '".TABLE_PREFIX."mytable'";

db_tmp_name is set properly before the query, it works fine on my dev machine, however I asked someone here to beta test it, and he got table doesnt exist error. So does someone have a fool proof method to check weather a table exists for mysql4 ?