how to handle sessions for multiple applications on one server

how do you handle session data for multiple applications if they run on one server and session variables have the same names in each application? the problem i was currently facing was that i run many application on my server (at home) and if i open a browser window for one application and another for another application (session id is in the cookie therefor and both browser instances use the same sessionId) which runs on the same server, both use the session variable "user", which means that always the application i am currently browsing in uses the session variable "user" no matter which application had saved it, so it might appear that in the one application i am registered as "userX" and in the other as "userY" ... is there any standard procedure to prevent this from happening? well i wrote a work around ... is that necessary? or does any PEAR component handle this? i have not found anything yet Wolfram