All but what i want (caching and cookies problem)

Hi all .. 3 things happen on my site at the moment for which i have no solution: 1) .. i manage username and password by using permanent session variables.. say session_start(); session_register($username); session_register($password); this should work and in fact it does work ALMOST all the time.. sometimes when clicking (quckly some say) trought the pages (that all require this registration) the registration information will be lost.. so people get kicked out of the system (or go to anonymous mode as predefined).. in the PHP.INI its stated that by default value the cookie should persiste trought all the time the browser is open bu this is not the cas.e. any idea? 2) CACHE. in certain pages i have activate the cache by explicitally calling the session_cache_limiter function with the "private" or "public" attribute. .. in the php.ini you can theoretically specift the number of seconds this will act on. I have checked with a low level web client and the EXPIRE time given for the cache by the server is in fact 300 secs.. then WHY o why .. this information seem to be very empirically employed by the web clien? sometimes its 6 minites.. sometiems can be half an hour.. people have been lcicking on that page hoping for an update for 2 hours without being allowed to see an updated page.. the client is (as always) IE 5 or 5.5 .. I have head somewhere (RFCs? ) that without having clear indications of the cache a client could take a look at the creation date of the page to euristically estimate the cache expiration . The page creation date is in fact sent by the server and is quite old.. (the php creation date?) and could in fact justify a much longer cache period. How do i get a cache NOT to exceed 300 seconds in any occasions? (rfc are quite explicts about maintaining semantical coherence so to be quite conservativa about it but i guess some1 in the middle doesnt think its that importnat as a thing) last thing: the expiry time of a cache shoudl really be settable via a function (isntead of the php.ini file) so ic ould have different caching time for different pages.... any feels like hacking this thing in? :) Giovanni Tummarello tummarel@ascu.unian.it Fight Spam! Join CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) at http://www.cauce.org/ and tell your Congresspeople how Spam mailings hurt you. Help protect genuine Internet commerce: Outlaw UCE Spamming.