FW: Cookies, Dammit!

Is there a way to: 1. Set cookies to a particular value (e.g., foo=hi and bar=ho), AND 2. Redirect the user to a new page in a different directory? AND 3. have the new page be able to retrieve the values of both foo and bar? I'm redirecting users from an index.htm page to an index.php page (because our server is not set up to have index.php as a default page), and trying to set cookies on the index.php page prior to redirecting the user to an index.htm page in an entirely different directory (why? because for some reason I thought it would streamline one of our processes). However, the cookies simply don't get set; a document.write command on the second index.html page shows that the value of the cookies is null. The value of the cookies are determined by the results of a query run against a MySQL directory, so they cannot be set on the first index.html page. I have been struggling with this conundrum for three days at this point, with no success. Let me know if this doesn't make sense.