I always understood that if
display_errors = Off
was set in your php.ini you could always overide it with either of the following in your script , as an example for the purposes of de-bugging
error_reporting (E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);
ini_set ('error_reporting', E_ALL);
This doesn't seem to be the case on any of the servers I've tried it on. Am I missing something fundamentally obvious.
Cheers
Stew