I've had a lot of weird experiences with sessions this week.

They sometimes seem to time out in mere seconds. It's even not hard to see a page, perhaps a comment reply page, that lists my logged-in name under "Your name", shows the administer menu under navigation (though without my username), yet also shows the user login box as if I'm not logged in -- all on a single page. I am baffled, and I've seen some comments left by people other than me show up as if they were left by me. I also saw my wife's session suddely switch from her username to mine, in the middle of working around on the site.

Here are the things I've tried:

* Deleteing everything in the sessions table * Upgrading from Drupal 4.5.1 to 4.6.0 * Disabling cache support in Settings * Clearing browser cache and cookies * Enabling PHP entropy for session IDs

This whole problem started after I:

* Disabled the Spam module * Enabled the Captcha module * Used a MySQL query to remove about 2500 spam comments from the comments table, dropped the spam_* tables, then followed the instructions on drupal.org for forcing a rebuild of the search index * Applied the small Captha patch to the comment module

The problem most frequently occurs when I go to leave a comment. It's 100% reproducible when I pull up the "leave a comment" page. However, I believe it did occur in other circumstances before, though I can't reproduce them now.

Here's another weird thing. I host four drupal sites on this machine. All four exhibited the problem. Now one is working fine, but another is still problematic (I haven't tested the other two). I can't think what may have caused the one to become "normal" again.

I am using all of the Drupal defaults for the PHP session-handling parameters.

Thanks, John