Clicking Checkout shows Cookies not enabled message

I've read this entire thread twice, zoomed in on posts 24 and 26 a few more times, and I'm still a bit confused - especially looking at the dates they were posted. I've got 1.3.9h installed. Just two weeks ago I had a customer tell me he couldn't get the site to work (no further info) even though he'd set his settings to "medium." That's all I could get out of him. He was a repeat customer paying by check, so I just processed it manually. Now, reading this thread it looks like a problem in the robots list? But my version of ZC is supposed to have the latest list - so maybe that's not it? And I still don't get the cookies settings. I have no SSL at the moment - Paypal directs to their site. I'm working on getting full SSL, I won't be using the shared SSL certificaate. So can I force cookies? Is that related to the cause of the problem, and is it a safe fix? And are those settings from a couple of posts up correct? Just call me slow....

WiccanWitch420:

Here are my configurations tell me if i need to change something
Sessions
Title Value Action
Session Directory HIDDEN FOR SECURITY
Cookie Domain True
Force Cookie Use False
Check SSL Session ID False
Check User Agent False
Check IP Address False
Prevent Spider Sessions True
Recreate Session False
IP to Host Conversion Status true
Use root path for cookie path False
Add period prefix to cookie domain True
"recreate session" should be set to True, unless you want to allow session-hijacking on your site. It's a very rare server configuration which will refuse to work when this is set to True, and even those rare situations leave the site vulnerable to that problem.
The other settings are all defaults, which are the recommended settings for all sites. Changes to any of these settings should ONLY be made when very specific needs dictate such, and only when all consequences are thoroughly understood.

joejoejoe:

I had a customer tell me he couldn't get the site to work (no further info) even though he'd set his settings to "medium." That's all I could get out of him.

What EXACT browser version is THAT customer using? What user-agent is it supplying to your store when that customer is ACTIVELY visiting your store? (ie: what's it showing in whos-online?) Is there anything in that user-agent identification that could be construed as a spider mistakenly?

I doubt you have any of the answers to those questions, but that's what you need to find out.

DrByte:

What EXACT browser version is THAT customer using? What user-agent is it supplying to your store when that customer is ACTIVELY visiting your store? (ie: what's it showing in whos-online?) Is there anything in that user-agent identification that could be construed as a spider mistakenly?

I doubt you have any of the answers to those questions, but that's what you need to find out.

Yes, unfortunately I got about all the data I could without flying out there and looking at the guy's computer myself. But I'll check those other settings to make sure they're correct. Thanks

Had another customer complain just now. Somehow he got his order through, but he left a comment on the order form:
BTW, I was having problems with using Firefox, I kept getting cookie errors, even though I have Firefox set to accept cookies.

I went onlne about an hour after he ordered, so I was able to go through the logs and search based on his ip address from the confirmation email. This is all I know how to find:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)

So I reread this thread for the third time, and this time I think I understood there was a problem in the spiders file so I downloaded the new one the good doctor posted and uploaded. I hope that solves the problem - I noticed a few people who were filling up their carts yesterday while I was on the admin panel, and they never finished their orders - that seems to have increased a lot in the past two weeks after I went to 1.3.9.h from whatever version of 1.3.9 I had before. Maybe that was the problem. Nothing else showed up in the error logs or the log files in the cache.

I still don't see how the customer could have been confused for a spider, but I a far from being an expert.