Rob Allen has a quick tip for Zend Framework users looking to get to the configuration values in their application.ini file.
Zend_Application will read the data in your application.ini and make it available from your bootstrap's getOptions() method. It then sets the bootstrap as a parameter in the front controller. Note that the top level keys are all normalised to lowercase too. You can then retrieve the options in a number of ways.
He gives examples of pulling them into a controller, an object outside the controller and an interesting conflict that using the Zend_Config component could cause.