sessions nightmare

Greetings, I am a new user to php and sessions and for the life of me I cannot figure this out.... I want to be able to have a user login (which is completed), they goto a search page (completed), and search for a particular item (completed). A page will display all the links for the items searched for (completed). What I want out of sessions is to when they click on the link for a particular item, the item number stay in a session so it can be called through out each page they goto. What I have as a base of test code is the following (this was taken from someone's example): test1.php: <?php session_start( ); session_register("SESSION"); *** THE FOLLOWING VARIABLE ($retrived_itemno) WOULD NEED TO BE SET ON THE *** SEARCH PAGE *** $SESSION["item"] = $retrived_itemno; $test2Url = "test2.php?PHPSESSID=" . session_id( ); ?> <a href="<?=$test2Url ?>">Goto next page</a> test2.php: <?php session_start( ); echo "the retrived value equals: $SESSION[item]"; ?> After you click the hyperlink on test1.php, test2.php will load and the session ID is in the URL, but nothing is displayed in the echo for $SESSION[item] in test2.php. What is going on?!#!#!$# Thanks a million in advance!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Chris