[development] Minimum required for a login

[Chris Puzio]

I need to be able to manually force a login without using the login 
subsystem. I was wondering if anyone knew the minimum needed to consider 
a user 'logged in'. It looked to me that setting the $user variable was 
key but I wasn't sure what else was necessary - and if its possible to 
do outside of the framework just by setting certain variables.

Chris Puzio