Question about HTTP_ENV_VARS, PHP, and Apache

This may be more of an Apache question, but I was hoping that someone here would have an idea about this. I tracked down a bug in one of my scripts that was caused by environment variable that was being registered as global without my knowledge (due to the register_globals setting). My script was depending on this variable not being set in certain conditions but I didn't take into account the fact that it could be set via an environment variable. While troubleshooting this I was looking through the output of phpinfo() and I found something curious in the environment variables across the three different servers that I administer. All three are running Redhat, Apache 1.3.19, and PHP 4.0.4.pl1, with PHP compiled as an Apache module (--with-apxs). One of the servers is Redhat 7.0, the other two are Redhat 7.1. On both the Redhat 7.1 servers, phpinfo() reports the following environment variables: user: michaels logname: michaels bash_env: /home/michaels/.bashrc mail: /var/spool/mail/michaels "michaels" is the user account that I use on these servers to do a majority of my work, only su'ing to root when absolutely necessary. I'm confused as to why these variables exist. I know for a fact that Apache is running as "nobody". That's what the httpd.conf file is configured for and I can verify that by viewing the output of "ps aux" I did build apache and php as this user, but I su'ed to root for the "make install" portion. I launched apache with "apachectl" as root. On the Redhat 7.0 machine these env vars don't exist. Can anyone enlighten me or perhaps point me to a source of more info? Any help would be appreciated...