Changing environment variables ? (stupid question)

I'm having problems getting PHP to talk to Oracle, and I think it's caused by some environment variables. Using phpinfo(), it's clear that I've managed to change (for example) the _SERVER["ORACLE_HOME"] (server variable?) by using SetEnv statement in httpd.conf. But, _ENV["ORACLE_HOME"] (environment variable?) still shows the wrong value. I tried entering the right value in apachectl, but it still doesn't change. Does anyone knows how to accomplish this ? Please let me know. btw - I'm using Apache 1.3.31 on Solaris 8, PHP 4.3.6 Many thanks, Harry