REPEAT w/ more detail: Menu Limit – 89 items work – 90 items crash menu

Our site has 89 menu entries… If we add one more (90th), it crashes the menu and it no longer shows up on site… To fix we remove the last menu item added and reconnect MAIN MENU and it comes back. Research online seems to point to Suhosin and recommends adding php.ini to the root directory of the site asfollows (this did not help after apache restart):

increase the following directives in php.ini:

suhosin.post.max_vars = 3000
suhosin.request.max_vars = 3000

Any ideas on how to allow for more menu content? We need at least 30 more pages