This is an addition to my post above.

I have two functions called my_siteTop and my_siteBottom, which draw the header and footer for every one of my pages on my site. I believe this is the root of my problem with getting the global.php and login script to work correctly.

Here's what it looks like now:

<?
$path= "c:/nusphere/apache/htdocs";
$baseref= "http://localhost/";

require("$path/bulletinboard/global.php3");
function my_siteTop (
$page= "",
$title= "",
$description= "",
$keywords= "",
$author= "",
$baseref= "http://localhost/",
$path= "/www/webdirectorylocation"
)
{
global $path;
global $baseref;
include("$path/include/site_top.php3");
}

function my_siteBottom (
$path= "/www/webdirectorylocation"
)
{
global $path;
include("$path/include/site_bottom.php3");
}
?>