PHP 4.2 - hard-coded paths

I just installed Apache 2 and PHP 4.2. It does work and phpinfo() brings up indications of Apache 2 and the correct PHP version. However, the paths to resources on my system seem to be hard-coded within the php4ts.dll. The path to php.ini indicates c:\winnt (which has been hard-coded in the binary releases for a while, that's another issue). However, it isn't picking anything up from c:\winnt\php.ini. Instead, paths to extensions, the include_path, session temp path, etc. all have values in phpinfo(), but not the values in ANY php.ini on my system. After opening php4ts.dll in a text editor, all of those paths are in there in clear text. Was this hard-coding intentional in the 4.2 binaries? The new way of doing things? I'd rather not have to recompile on Windows (the whole Visual C++ requirement takes the "free" out of PHP), but will have to if it's the only way to configure paths.