Okay, I get it now. Here's the deal ....
ASP, CFusion, PHP, CGI (Perl or whatever) all of this web language stuff have common properties. One of which whose concept you need to grasp is this : These languages run on the server and return HTML. Once the HTML is sent back,
you cannot modify the script's variables. If you like we can get more in depth about this and why you can't do what you want to do, but hopefully this will suffice.
Here is an alternitive :
Use flags to tell the next page you want to set this variable. Like this : <a href = "page2.php?set_var=5">link</a> <a href = "page3.php?set_var=10">link2</a> and then on the other pages just do something like this :
<? if(isset($set_var)) {
$var = $set_var;
}?>
Cool?