There was a php.ini file in the php folder in each instance. It contained only instructions for error reporting. The existence of this file was causing the problems. In the lang account, the incomplete php.ini file was over-riding settings in the default php.ini file in /usr/lib/ on the main unix box (though that conflicts with my understanding of the cascade relationship). Once I got rid of the extraneous php.ini file in lang, it worked. In the lang02 account, there was a .htaccess file in the root of the account that specified that the phpconfig path should be a php.ini file in another folder in the account. That file worked as long as the url incoming was "lang02" and not "hrd". Again, not sure why accessing the files through the hrd url would bypass that .htaccess file in the root of the lang02 account, but it did. Once I got rid of the extraneous .htaccess and php.ini file in the lang02 account both the lang02 and the hrd urls work.