Problems with PGOPTIONS

Hi all,

I have a devel server where i want to turn on collector statistics.
I want to enable the collection of STATS_ROW_LEVEL for special backends
by setting the environment-variable export PGOPTIONS='-c STATS_ROW_LEVEL=ON'.
After setting this variable i cant connect to my database.
Everytime the following error occurs:

Connection to database 'mydb' failed.
FATAL 1:  permission denied

After unset PGOPTIONS everything works without any problems.
I have tested the same with an example C-program found under http://www.postgresql.org/idocs/
but always got the same error if i want to send additional options.

Did i make some mistakes ?

Thanks in advance for help

as