very strange behaviour under https

i've been having strange behaviour from php since i run my code from behind https. i made a forum with PHP and MySQL (who didn't?), and it runs without any problems. about 10 people worked with it for a month or three and it ran just fine all that time. but now i decided to place that same forum behind https (apache + mod_ssl) and i get strange behaviour. what happens is that occasionally some get/post variabeles seem to get lost (i think) this all seems to occur very randomly so it is very hard to reproduce at any given time. just to make sure the problem isn't within my code also made virtual directory without https accessing exactly the same code and there are no such errors. what could be going on here? config: redhat 6.2 mysql-3.23.39 Apache/1.3.26 PHP/4.2.1 mod_perl/1.27 mod_ssl/2.8.9 OpenSSL/0.9.6c php configure command: './configure' '--with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs' '--with-imap' '--with-mysql' '--enable-track-vars' '--with-openssl=/usr/local/ssl' '--enable-sockets' '--with-xml' '--with-zlib' '--with-java=/usr/local/j2sdk1.4.0' '--with-pgsql'