I think you hit it on the hardening system. By default suhosin will limit the amount of variables that can be posted. There are several settings that revolve around this, post array size, etc. So it sounds like maybe they are running the default settings and it's chopping off some of the post variables, resulting in 0 for those settings that get cut off.
I believe they can change this for you on a per directory basis, so these limits won't be imposed.
