'logged in' tracking...

Hi All, Here's the problem. A user logs in. When they click on a link to go to another page on the site, we would like to keep their 'logged in' status alive. However, we would like to do this without cookies, and, if possible, without the ?= in the URL. Forms are possible, but buttons would look rather odd on some drop menus we've put in there. I looked at the session stuff for PHP4 (http://www.php.net/manual/ref.session.php), and, if I understand correctly, if PHP is compiled with --enable-trans-sid , then the ?= in the URL is not necessary. Is this correct? Would this solve our problem? I have some session tracking scripts for PHP3, but they involved querying the db every time a page loads, which although there would be minimal effects for the user, is undesirable in this situation. We have also considered using javascript, in which after a user logs in, we created a 'hidden' frame with only their user-id and access status. In each page with content, we would use js to grab those two variables from the hidden frame and work from there. We would prefer using what is available (the PHP4 sessions functionality). Is that the way we should go or do you recommend another way? Thanks, Marco