With the help of ViArt support Ive found the Suhosin PHP patch to "harden" a servers PHP can cause problems.
 
In my case trying to make CMS layout changes on the home page gave "error Left Column Width is required / Right Column Width is required" errors - even though I had entered them.
 
Support said:
++++++++
".. the problem is inside your PHP settings,
you may see it at your phpinfo page:
 
suhosin.post.max_vars 200 200
 
That means no more than 200 variables are transfered from the form to the script and thats why some data is lost. We recommend you to change this setting to 1000, because some ViArt forms consist of more than 200 variables."
+++++++++
 
The official Suhosin patch and thus many of its distributions come with the "200" setting.
Running phpinfo on your server will find out if it is installed and the settings.
 
If the server is not yours you will have to contact the server administrator for the change.
HTH

Ned,
 
Thanks for posting this. You probably saved me hours by doing so. Also thanks to ViArt for the fast, solid search functionality here and on the manual.

I'm not having any luck with this issue.
 
suhosin.request.max_vars = 2048
suhosin.cookie.max_vars = 2048
suhosin.get.max_vars = 2048
suhosin.post.max_vars = 2048
 
I've used this and I still get the error.

Sakui the variables you quote are bigger than the ones I'm using so I suspect its another one causing trouble if you are getting the above errors.
 
As ViArt have now added attachments its here as a PDF.

post working fine with php 4.4.8
 
but showing only 48 values in php 5.2.6
 
have no idea whats the problem?
 
compared the phpinfo of both versions still unable to fix the problem
 
 
 

I had the same problem but got it to work OK by adding the below to my htaccess file.
 
php_value suhosin.post.max_vars 1000
php_value suhosin.cookie.max_vars 1000
php_value suhosin.get.max_vars 1000
php_value suhosin.request.max_vars 1000

Thats very helpful Bob for those who can't get server administration.
Thank you