I run Panther at home and my host runs Linux. Panther installs PHP with register globlas off and my host has them on. For the sake of security, should I rewrite my scripts to run on Panther or should I reconfig Panther to be the same as my host?
In my opinion, it is always good practice to write scripts with register globals "OFF"
Indeed. For security sake, you should ask your host to turn off register_globals, or at least ask for the ability to do so yourself (via .htaccess).