vars between instantiate class...

I am trying to see how many times a person has tried to log in during a session. the login script... $objAuth->start(); if ($objAuth->getAuth()) // is user logged in already ...display hello page... else ...display login page OK, so far so good. If the user punches in anything wrong, the login gets displayed again. Now I want to track this iteration of attempts. In the START method, I did this... $this->_loginAttempts = $this->_loginAttempts + 1; then I added echo $objAuth->getLoginAttempts(); before ...display login page... to see how it tracks. It always displays '1' To me, it looks like '$objAuth->start();' , which is called each time the page runs, which is each time a login attempt is made, is re-initializing all the class vars to their default state. If I make _loginAttempts = 8, then it displays 9. So, my question (this time) is how do I get the class to track this counter? I hope I explained this well enough. I really don't think this is a PEAR::Auth specific question. I think it's just a "how do I keep this counter going in a class" question. Thanks Walter