Customer's Session Keeps Expiring

[voltage]

I have had several customers who have not been able to login to their account. I spoke to one via my live chat. I actually watched him sign up for his account. The account was created, but then immediately in told him that his session had expired. He tried to log in again and again but it kept booting him out, telling him his session had expired and go to the time out page. I thought it was the SEO mod I had installed, but I deactivated it and the problem persisted.

I am using zencart 1.3.02. We went live a week or two ago and have had several customers a day with the same problem.

[voltage]

It might be some type of browser problem. I have two computers, side by side, I can login on both with internet explorer, but one keeps redirecting me to the login with Firefox, the other one works correctly. I have compared the settings and they appear the same.

Help

[Ajeh]

What are your settings in Configuration ... Session Settings ...

Where do you store sessions? database or files?

Any particular ISP that your customers with issues are using such as AOL?

NOTE: be sure you upgrade to the next version ... I'd say upgrade to v1.3.5 but we hope to have the next release of v1.3.6 out before you would get done ...

[voltage]

I store in database, not files.

Here are my default settings (I've never changed them)

Cookie Domain True Info
Force Cookie Use False Info
Check SSL Session ID False Info
Check User Agent False Info
Check IP Address False Info
Prevent Spider Sessions True Info
Recreate Session True Info
IP to Host Conversion Status true

[Ajeh]

Turn this to FALSE:
Recreate Session True Info

[voltage]

Ok, turning 'Force Cookie Use' to True solved the problem, or at least so it appears.

What exactly does this do? (sorry, novice in this area). What are the downsides to forcing cookie use?

Thanks

[Ajeh]

Then turn off SEO and have that set to False ... sounds like it would be the Recreate or a combo of Recreate and the SEO ....

[Ajeh]

Forced cookies is a bad plan for customers without cookies turned on ...

Try the other setting first ...

[voltage]

Ok, I flipped recreate session to false, and also Force cookie use. This works as well.

So what settings should I do? It looks like I choose between forcing the cookie, or recreating the session. Which is more likely to help a broader range of customers?

Oh, and SEO has been turned off the whole time.

Oh, you solved my question. So turn recreate session off. Is there any potential problems with this?

[Ajeh]

While we prefer recreate sessions on ... this can be a problem on some sites ...

To do a good test, be sure that you have closed all browser sessions, cleared cache and cookies, empty the tables via phpMyAdmin:
sessions
db_cache
whos_online

WARNING: If you have folks on your site ... wait until they go away before clearing those tables ...

When you toss their sessions it tosses their cart, login, etc.