Cookie Encryption troubles

If anyone can see something wrong with this function and the way I call it, please tell me whats up. I made this function to save me from specifying the key in about 6 different if blocks, plus it saves time writing out mcrypt_blah blah blah. I look at it and can see nothing wrong with it, although I don't get the right result when I decode it. Its something to do with the setting of the cookie. function usrcryp($user, $cryp, &$err){ $key = "a very special key"; $err .= "function usrcryp(".$user." , ".$cryp.")<br>\n"; //This is for debugging purposes so I can see what is getting passed to it $encuser = mcrypt_ecb(MCRYPT_TripleDES, $key, $user, $cryp); $err .= $encuser."<br>\n"; // more debugging return $encuser; } //To call it: $usrname = usrcryp($name, "MCRYPT_ENCRYPT", $err) I'm using the encrypted data to form cookies. Somehow the cookie vals that are being returned aren't being decoded properly If I use this to set the cookie: setcookie("uname" , usrcryp($username, "MCRYPT_ENCRYPT", $err), time()+3600 ); and this to decrypt it: $usrname = usrcryp($uname, "MCRYPT_DECRYPT", $err); echo "$usrname\n"; //returns garbage I know whats being passed to it in the first place before I encode it is right, I get that from echoing the err var. but once I get the encrypted data back from the cookie and pass it to usrcryp it doesn't return the right decoded username. I could really use some help because i've tried everything, I know the encryption function works on regular data, but cookies don't seem to encode properlly. Its really annoying me. Thanks Drew