Stopping objects from auto-serializing

Hi, I'm trying to set up my PHP app at my host, but am stumbling over the PHP configuration there. register_globals is enabled, which seems to auto-serialize my objects into $_SESSION, which in some cases overwrites variables in there. I'm not sure if register_globals is where the auto-serialization comes from, but it seems to be closely related at least and I'm not in my best form today... I tried putting "php_flag register_globals off" into an .htaccess file, but that throws an Apache misconfiguration error. Using set_ini() doesn't seem to do anything either. Any advise on how to turn serialization off without dabbling with the configuration file? Chrs, Dav