how do sessions work in vb3 beta 7?

[bradsears]

I use the vbulletin back end to help me with user management (and forum of course) on a web application I am building.

- I collect some user data with form1.php
- I post to the form1.php and validate the post variables
- after successful validation set them all to session variables and and redirect to form2.php (visual verification for the user) and so on through my 5 page process.
- my session variables are not present in form2.php like they were in vbulletin 2.3
- it looks like the sesison gets cleared in sessions.php
- since sessions.php is called from global.php then my problem is that I need the vbulletin back end but I need my sessions as well

The two ideas I have through of are:
1) forget this multi page process and put all the stuff on one multi stage page and just use post variables for everything, skipping sessions completely
2) convert all my session variables to variables in sessions.php before the session clear

I appreciate your time. Thanks