Newbie scope revisited

I posted a couple of days ago inquiring as to why some inhierited PHP code was not working. I determined that scope was the issue. The overwhelming response I got back pertained to register_globals. I have read up on register_globals and realize that it is not considered good practice to use it. Still investigating I run phpinfo(), it turns out that register_globals is set to ON (both places). However the server does not act this way. I searched for an htaccess file, which I belive (not sure) can override settings in the ini file. I could not find one. So now I am stuck in the same place I started. My client doesn't want to pay for me to "scope" all of the variables in the application, but it doesn't appear to work without the proper scoping. Any suggestions on further research will be appreciated. Matthew