MySQL and Sessions - again

I'm having a hell of a time getting sessions to work nicely with MySQL. I thought with php 4.0.1 my prayers might be answered. I'm trying to get sessions into MySQL so we can distribute load across a number of servers. Before I did my own session handling, I was excited to give session.save_handler a try. However, under 4.0.0 I couldn't seem to get write or close to be called, though open and read worked fine. Under 4.0.1 I get nothing at all. When I change save_handler to user instead of files I get: [28-Jun-2000 22:25:13] PHP Fatal error: Failed to initialize session module in Unknown on line 0 trying the following as some suggested also fails: assert(get_cfg_var("session.save_handler") == "user"); Yuch to say the least. Writing my own session handling is not much of an issue, but I'd love to be able to use the built in stuff. Any success stories out there? Any tips or tricks? This is an Linux/SMP system. August