Looks like you might have an issue with the query generation as everyone else is pointing to as well. As Akash pointed out it's always good to build your query in to a string first and then feed that string to the MySQL API. This gives you easy access to handy debugging techniques. If you are still having problems try this.
$id = 1;
$query = "SELECT * FROM `topics1` WHERE `id`={$id}";
echo ": Attempting Query -> {$query}<br />";
$res = mysql_query($query, $dblink);
if($res <= 0)
die("The query failed!<br />" . mysql_error($dblink) . "<br />");
$cnt = mysql_num_rows($res);
if($cnt <= 0)
{
$query = "SELECT `id` FROM `topics1`";
echo "No records where found? Make sure this id exists...<br />{$query}<br /><br />";
$res = mysql_query($query, $dblink);
if($res <= 0)
die("The id listing query failed!<br />" . mysql_error($dblink) . "<br />");
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($res))
echo "ID: " . $row['id'] . "<br />";
}
This will at least let you monitor between calls, see what your query actually looks like, what mysql says about it and if all else fails make sure that the ID you are looking for actually exists.
echovariable for debugging, usevar_dump.echo "1 ";will give you the same output asecho "1";and you will be unaware of any non printable characters, whilevar_dumpwill tell you type and size in bytes.