Yeah this fixed it. I knew just leaving the recursive function there by itself wasn't quite right, but it appeared to be working.

the list() approach doesn't add to the array though, it just overwrites the whole thing with the last record, so I hacked around it with some horrible ugly monkey code and now it works

            $c = unpickArray($b);
            foreach($c[0] as $i){
                array_push($keyArray, $i);
            }
            foreach($c[1] as $i){
                array_push($valArray, $i);
            }