Custom configuration options

Hello everyone, What I'd like to do is make up my own configuration options and assign values to them so that these values would be available to any php script. I've tried putting them in php.ini, but if it's not a standard config option, I get a php.ini parse error on startup. I've also tried using the php_value directive in the apache httpd.conf (I'm using php as an apache module under Win2000 with Oracle, by the way). This generates no errors, but the value does not seem to be set. I suppose I could do this with environment variables, but using some kind of config file just seems better. Thanks in advance for any suggestions. Jim