I decided to go ahead and test the PHP session handling capability outside of Drupal, using lynx as the web browser. I started with this: <?php session_start(); if (!isset($_SESSION['count'])) { $_SESSION['count'] = 0; } else { $_SESSION['count'] += 32; } echo "<html><body>{$_SESSION['count']}</body></html>"; ?> As I expected, not only did lynx receive a cookie, but the page incremented by 32 every time I reloaded it, as one would expect from this code. Okay, so not a basic sessions problem between PHP and Lynx. So then I moved on... I pulled the INI changes from the settings.php file, and added them to the mix: ini_set('arg_separator.output', '&'); ini_set('magic_quotes_runtime', 0); ini_set('magic_quotes_sybase', 0); ini_set('session.cache_expire', 200000); ini_set('session.cache_limiter', 'none'); ini_set('session.cookie_lifetime', 2000000); ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime', 200000); ini_set('session.use_only_cookies', 1); ini_set('session.use_trans_sid', 0); ini_set('url_rewriter.tags', ''); Installing those options made no difference--the cookie was still sent to lynx, and the number incremented. Lastly, I added this, also from settings.php: if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'])) { $domain = '.'. preg_replace('`^www.`', '', $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']); // Per RFC 2109, cookie domains must contain at least one dot other than the // first. For hosts such as 'localhost', we don't set a cookie domain. if (count(explode('.', $domain)) > 2) { ini_set('session.cookie_domain', $domain); } } and boom: no cookie, no incrementing number. So I commented out the identical section in settings.php, as the comments therein suggest, with no joy. I then tried manually setting the cookie domain, but still no joy. Back now to square one. The only thing different between what I ran and what Drupal is running, seems to be the following directive: ini_set('session.save_handler', 'user'); I would not expect that to be the problem, but my knowledge is limited. Luke