I believe I may have found something that might help people who, after uploading a Joomla 1.5 template to their server, are told (on the Pre-installation Check, Recommended Settings module) that their "Register Globals" is set to "On" instead of "Off".
Here is the cause: In my case, I was creating a website on GoDaddy. On setting up the account, GoDaddy gave me PHP 4 instead of PHP 5. This was fixed by going into the GoDaddy Hosting Control Center, go up to the green "Content" tab and click on the drop down of "Languages." Here you get a radio button choice of PHP 4 or PHP 5. Change to PHP 5. It says it may need up to 24 hours, but in my case, it took only about 10 minutes. When I went back onto the Pre-Installation Check, magically, Register Globals is now fixed.
This took a while to figure out because in some forums people kept saying the problem was in the php.ini file in the root folder. Well, I'm still new to PHP so I hope I'm not saying something really stupid here, but it seems to me that at this point in the installation process -- that is, on the Pre-Installation Check -- there is not yet any php.ini file to fix! It doesn't exist yet. As far as I can tell, the php.ini file is created by doing the steps of the Joomla Installation, for which the Pre-Installation Check is Step 2 of 7. Step 6 is "Configuration" -- which is where the proper PHP files -- I'm guessing -- probably are created.
So after looking in vain for this missing php.ini file I finally noticed that all my existing websites have a php.ini file. But this new website, which was not configured yet, there was no php.ini file. Hopefully this will save some people some wasted hours. Cheers! Spell