[galt]

Thanks. I had already tried that, then removed it. That was my reference to "the global hack referenced a few posts back". It did not help. At this point I am creating a new user and maintaining critical fields managed with some SQL directly into the vB database. As soon as I figure out cookies and login, I am good to go. That is, until vB changes the user scheme, at which time i will have an ongoing maintenance nightmare. OTOH it took me 2-3 hours to figure out and write the custom code from scratch, and I spent many more hours than that (and got more frustrated) trying to research and utilize the VB object library.

Added -----

After more review, I see that you added lines relating to $backupdb. That may have done the trick, but dealing with vB and its programming philosophy is just a nightmare, and I am too close to done to go backwards again. Thanks for your effort though.