register_globals and passing variables

Ok, all I am new to PHP & MySQL. (please don't let this scare you off) I had my site hosted with Gisol.com and due to their very poor service and tech support I left them for Lunarpages.com who so far have a better service and their tech support is excellent!! But my pages won't pass variables any more. When I started I purchased two books MySQL and PHP & MySQL both published by O'Riely. So far the are excellent help and instructors. I wote some pages where I track users and their characters from an on-line game called World of Warcraft. On the Gisol server they were working EXCELLENT!! Once I moved to Lunarpages, the pages load ok but they don't pass the variables from one page to another. The below code queries the db and list's the user's in a table, and has a hyperlink to the right of each, on Gisol I could click the link and it would load the view_char.php page and it listed their character and the info i needed, and gave options to delete and edit. Again it was working beautifully. VIEW USERS PAGE CODE: $sql="SELECT f_name, l_name, char_id, char_name, char_level FROM t_char, t_users where t_users.user_id = t_char.user_link ORDER BY char_name ASC"; mysql_select_db($db_select,$db); $result = mysql_query($sql,$db); echo "<TABLE border=2>"; echo"<TR><TD><B>Character Name</B><TD><B>Character Level</B><TD><B>Owner</B></TR>"; while ($myrow = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { echo "<TR><TD>".$myrow["char_name"]."<TD>".$myrow["char_level"]."<TD>".$myrow["f_name"]." ".$myrow["l_name"]; echo "<TD><A href=\"view_char.php?charid=".$myrow["char_id"]."\">View</A>"; } //$charid="[.$myrow["char_id"].]"; <----- I tried this line with no success. Possibly have it in the wrong place?? echo"</TABLE>"; VIEW_CHAR PAGE CODE $sql = "SELECT * FROM t_char WHERE t_char.char_id = '$charid'"; <-- now all this does is produce a blank page... used to work great! //$sql = "SELECT * FROM t_char WHERE t_char.char_id = '21'"; <----- i used this code to test the page w/o the $charid string and it works FINE!! $result=mysql_query( $sql ); if (!$result) { die("Could not query the database: <br />".mysql_error()); } I wrote a help ticket to Lunarpages where I am now hosted and asked them to set the register_globals to ON thinking this was the problem based on what I've read and the wrote back and told me that they use suPHP to parse php files and I have the option of using custom php.ini files. That I could create a .htaccess file or put individual php.ini files in the folder that contains the files im running. In other words do it myself. So I created this file: [PHP] register_globals = on named it php.ini and dropped it in the folder with all of my files. It didn't help any. So I added this line to the first file include ('php.ini'); all it does is add :[PHP] register_globals = on as text at the top of my page now. At this point im lost!! I don't know what to do to get my A href=\"view_char.php?charid=".$myrow["char_id"]." to equal $charid in the following pages. Any help you could provide me would GREATLY be APPRECIATED!!! Signed, I'm trying