INI path issues

When I expire you will find my hands wrapped tightly around the throat of a Windows network administrator. I had PHP installed on a web server, and all was working OK, save for one small thing. phpinfo() indicated that the path to the php.ini was c:\WINNT, which it was not. So I copy the file from the c:\php directory to the c:\winnt directory and restart IIS. Now, when I click a link to take me to a directory with an index.php I get a 404, not found error. If I refresh the page shows up just fine. So I remove the ini page, start and stop the IIS server, click the link, and no problem...the page is delivered just fine. Has anyone experienced this behavior before, and how do I fix that damned path to the ini? TIA!