sessions and sessionfiles

Hi there, well...I'm tired of searching so I'll drop a note here. I've been busy working with php (4.0.6) sessions lately for an online shopping cart, which works really great. Only problem is, the temporary session-files are not removed after a certain timeout occurs. The "session.gc_maxlifetime"-variable is set to 1440 seconds, which means the temporary session-files should be deleted after 24 minutes of inactivity from the client side. Unfortunately, nothing of a kind happens. A way around this problem is adding a cronjob which deletes session-files older than say 3 or 4 hours or so. I'd rather see a better solution...anyone? And is there any information available on wether or not the error of not deleting session-files has any consequences for newly created sessions? Anyone out there, if you have a serious and professional solution, please mail to dankolk@multiweb.nl. Thanks! Happy php-ing! Danny.