I'm having difficulty figuring out what's going on here, hoping some one can help me out.

I have been using php, mysql storing my session information in the database. The app is only running on localhost, vista. In the php.ini file I commented out the "session.save_handler = files" line and am using a php class to handle the session writes/reads, etc.

My login process is this: Submit login credentials via login.php. login.php calls loginprocess.php. loginprocess.php verifies user, and if valid starts a new session and adds data to the session vars, then it redirects to index.php.

Here's the problem. the loginprocess.php page has a bunch of session vars that get set like $_SESSION['account_id'] = $account_id; etc. but when I go to index.php and do a var_dump($_SESSION) it just says "array() empty". However, if I do a var_dump($_SESSION) in loginprocess.php, just before the redirection line header("Location: ../index.php"); then it shows all the data in the session variable. If I look in the database where the session information is stored, there is data in the session_id field, created_ts field, and expires field, but the session_data field has nothing inside of it and in the past this is the field where all my session data was stored.

How could I be able to var_dump the session in loginprocess.php, but the data not exist in the db table, is it using some kind of caching? I cleared my cookies, etc...but no change.

Why is the session_id, being written to the table, but the actual session data is not?

Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks.