That makes sense. To rehash for my own understanding the cookie should technically exist on the client's disk. However, I need to check for it at each page I want to restrict access too. When it finds the cookie it then creates a new session with the old parameters.

My next questions is how do I retrieve those old values since technically it could be looking for any CGISESSID that has been loaded. In other words, is it imperative that I pass CGISESSID to/between each html/cgi document that the client visits? I am using the following (updated) code to store and retrieve cookies:

sub setCookie($) {
   my($session) = @_;
   my $q = new CGI;
   $sid = $session->id();
   $cookie = $q->cookie(-name => "CGISESSID",
                        -value => $sid,
                        -expires => '+1h',
            -path => '/tmp/Sessions');
   print $q->header(-cookie=>$cookie);
}

sub retrieveSession() {
    $query = new CGI;
    $sid = $query->cookie("CGISESSID") || undef;
    $session = new CGI::Session(undef, $sid, {Directory=>'/tmp/Session
+s'});
    $sid = $session->id();
    $session = getUser($sid);    
    print $session->param("log_name");
    return $session;
}

sub getUser($) {
   my ($sid) = @_;
   $select = "SELECT username, password FROM Employees WHERE session_i
+d = '$sid'";
   $get_it = $db->prepare($select);
   $get_it->errstr, "\n";
   $rv = $get_it->execute() or die "Couldn't execute query '$select' \
+n";
   $get_it->bind_columns(undef, \$username, \$password); 
   $get_it->fetchrow_arrayref();   
   $session->param(-name=>"log_name", -value=>$username); $session->pa
+ram(-name=>"log_password", -value=>$password);   
   return $session;
}
[download]

Even though I have a cookie stored on disk that I can see the getUser and retrieveSession functions are not working properly. I would think that I wouldn't need to append cgisess_ to the beginning of the session id like cgisess_a983c8302e7a678a2e53c65e8bd3316 because it should take care of this automatically? Any other ideas? Thanks once again for helping out!