Need help with sessions not being recorded on non-VB pages (3.5.1)

[vedman]

I kinda doubt that this issue is common, but I'm hoping someone out there will be able to offer some advice. My problem deals with sessions, and probably requires a solid familiarity with vbulletin 3.5.x code.

I have a website that is partially integrated with my forums. The forums are located at "/forums"; the main site and all of its pages are located at "/". I want users to be signed in all over the entire site, so I have this code in the header of all pages outside of the forums.

PHP Code:

chdir('forums/');
require_once('./global.php');
chdir('../'); 


I have a login box form which passes what it needs, including a redirect value which, after logging the user in, goes back to the page they were on, even outside of the forums. This (and the userid and primary groupid) are really all I make use of with the integration on my non-forum pages.

This has worked just fine for months, on vBulletin 3.5 RCx to 3.5 Gold. I upgraded to 3.5.1 over the weekend, and it still works perfectly .... except for one thing: sessions.

For some reason, now sessions are not being updated in the forums session table when a site visitor (guest OR member) visits a page outside of the forums.

Before the upgrade, the session table was updated whenever a visitor accessed any page with global.php included in it. For example, the session table locations would look something like:

/index.php
/forums/index.php
/forums/poll.php
/contests.php
/index.php
/forums/showthread.php?t=34983
/tourn.php
/contests.php
....etc

I upgrade from 3.5 Gold to 3.5.1, and now my sessions table looks something like:

/forums/index.php
/forums/poll.php
/forums/showthread.php?t=34983
/forums/index.php
/forums/poll.php
/forums/showthread.php?t=34983
...etc.

Pages located outside of the forums should be showing up in the session table... because they are being visited. But, no.

It appears that the session update is being bypassed, but after comparing the changes in class_core, init, global, functions, functions_online, and a couple of other vb pages, I can't figure it out. Out of the few changes that were made in those pages, nothing that would be dependant on the root path of the script has changed, that I saw.

I even backtracked the code from the UPDATE to `session` (I think that's in save(), in class_core.php). After spending hours comparing the updated forum pages to the previous version and making sure my options and plugins are all working, I'm close to giving up.

Can anyone offer any advice? Neither my cookie domain, nor path (nor any other HTTP/cookie settings) changed with the upgrade, but could it still be a cookie thing, or have something do with lastactivity in the cookie?

Much thanks ...