Sessions still do not persist

I've posted several times mentioning that I am completely unable to cause sessions to persist. Over the intervening time, I have replicated this problem to a different machine, with the same results. Here's a recap of the problem. I am not using cookies. Sessions are automatically created (and changing that makes no difference) The relevant session variables (copied from phpinfo) are: Session Support enabled session.auto_start On <- hence no session_start session.name PHPSESSID session.use_cookies Off <- no cookies session.use_trans_sid On Environment is FreeBSD4.8. phpinfo for apache says: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) mod_perl/1.28 PHP/4.3.4 mod_ssl/2.8.16 OpenSSL/0.9.6d Here is a cut/paste of the borwser screen for the code below: Stage:0 SessionID: 04ace04b1fe0bc81d2cd678c9bab1619 _____ [Submit] Stage:1 SessionID: 04ace04b1fe0bc81d2cd678c9bab1619 Request: Array ( ) So I type "foo" into the box and hit submit. And the session variable is NOT preserved: Stage:0 SessionID: 55c70989b7279d6a18edfd81b28d67a6 foo___ [Submit] Stage:1 SessionID: 55c70989b7279d6a18edfd81b28d67a6 Request: Array ( [PHPSESSID] => 04ace04b1fe0bc81d2cd678c9bab1619 [field] => foo ) The session directory IS writable and I see the expected information being written there: -rw------- 1 nobody wheel 10 May 21 13:35 sess_04ace04b1fe0bc81d2cd678c9bab1619 -rw------- 1 nobody wheel 10 May 21 13:38 sess_55c70989b7279d6a18edfd81b28d67a6 Apache runs as user "nobody" on this server. Both session files contain: stage|i:1; but the files never seem to be being read back! Help!? Here's the entire php code I'm testing with: <? if (!isset($_SESSION['stage'])) { $_SESSION['stage'] = 0; } if (!isset($_POST['field'])) { $_POST['field'] = ""; } ?> <html> <head><title>PHP Test page</title></head> <body> <? echo "Stage:"; echo $_SESSION['stage']; echo " SessionID: "; echo session_id(); $_SESSION['stage'] = 1; ?> <form method="post" action="xxx.php"> <input type="text" maxlength="7" size="7" name="field" value="<?echo $_POST['field']?>"> <input type="submit" value="Submit"> </form> <? echo "Stage:"; echo $_SESSION['stage']; echo " "; echo " SessionID: "; echo session_id(); echo " "; echo " Request: "; print_r($_REQUEST); ?> </body> </html>