well, as i pointed out, the fix - for my situation, at least - was to increase the expiration time from 1hr to 2hrs. non-IE browsers seem to register 2hrs, and IE sets the cookie to one hour from the actual current time. my server time is "close" to my local time (the host can't seem to keep the time sync'd with reality!) but this is much longer than i want - i'd prefer 20 minutes, but i can't seem to get that. 12 hours and 2700 hours is way more than i want!! would it be more reasonable to generate the localtime, add 20 minutes to that, and directly assign that time in the cookie??