Ok I thought I had it solved but no. The error occurs Only when I try to create a new Content Type in Drupal 7, both in my local install in /var/www/html and on the remote server, which tends, I feel, to mean it's a fault in my apache system but I do not know where.
The strange thing is that no matter what I change the error remains verbatim from both systems: *Fatal error*: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 16142054 bytes) in */var/www/html/mysite/includes/database/database.inc* on line *2139*
Varying php.ini memory_limit merely changes the (tried to allocate 16142054) up or down a small amount.
I have searched through the whole system, /var/log..... and everywhere else for something that sets a limit to 134217728 bytes. I do note that there is no /etc/php5/php.ini in Fedora 18 even though it is mentioned in documentation.
This error seems to be all too common, with hundreds experiencing it with php, joomla, Wordpress and Drupal. There's a bug somewhere that's been ignored for years.
Thanks Roger