HELP! My categories and products are missing from the admin only.

[beasleybub]

I was trying to install a spanish language pack and had to delete it and re install the english language files. When I came back to my admin panel and went into the categories tab everything was gone! But everything is showing up on my site properly like it is still there and you can still purchase products from my site. There is no categories/product information or no order information in my admin but all is well on the site itself.
I went into mysql and all of the info is in the database but it is not showing up in my admin.
Please, Please help.

[beasleybub]

Quick update:

I just out of giggles added a category named test in the admin section of my site and it did show up on my front end but still is invisible on the backend.
Everything in the admin under categories and orders is not showing up.

[beasleybub]

Went to firefox and everything shows up in the admin.
I cleared everything in IE7 and it still does not show up in IE7.
All of this happened after trying to install a spanish language pack.

Any suggestions?

[beasleybub]

In addition to everything above...

If I cut and copy the admin url with the categories present from my working firefox browser and paste it into IE7 browser the categories show up in ie7.

Something very strange is going on here and it has nothing to do with IE7 directly.

Experts wanted please. Here is a good puzzle for you.
Thanks in advance!

[beasleybub]

Ok, I am trying to give as much information on this as possible.

I have discovered that there seems to be a problem with the zen AdminID=.
If I copy the zen AdminID="various code here" url from firefox and paste it to my IE7 url the categories and orders suddly work again BUT if I leave IE7 and come back to my admin and log in the same problem results (no info will show in the categories/products)

I can't for the life of me figure this out!
All I did was try to install a spanish language pack and then remove it and copy the english language pack and re install the stock english pack over the old one.

Lord have mercy! I hope someone out there can help me on this one. Thanks.

[beasleybub]

Found the problem.

Funny as it is the problem was not with the browser or zencart.

What has happened is the way I was logging in to my admin.
I had my admin saved to my favorites so I could easily access the login page and when you clicked the link it brought up

example 1
YOURSITE/admin/login.php?zenAdminID=0123456789

Some how this worked for over six months.
When you manually type in the url

example 2
YOURSITE/admin

the browser would bring up

example 3
YOURSITE/admin/login.php?zenAdminID=0123498765

Which totally different than example 1

Basically I realized that the AdminID's are unique for security purposes and that because example 1 and example 3 have different AdminID codes that caused the problem.

Sorry everyone for the long post but maybe if someone else has this problem in the future this will help.

Cheers

[Ajeh]

Thanks for the update ...

Be sure to never post or email or advertise or bookmark URLs with the zenid in them ... this is a bad thing ...

[beasleybub]

You are welcome!

I did not post the zen id. I used a fake "123456789" as I realize that the zen id is unique to the cart.