Help with Sessions - Should be easy =]

I am coming from an asp background, and am used to setting session variables very easily, but I cannot work them out here with all the different commands. I would like to store in a session variable output from a mysql db (Got the db bit working fine) but cannot for the life of me store or retrieve anything from a session variable. (more information if required) I am retreiving user information from a database after verification, and would like to place certain feilds into a session variable for easy access/retreival. I can get the information out of the database, but cannot place it into any sort of variable that will store on the page. I have the latest official PHP, running with IIS on a Windows 2K server with IIS. More questions to follow no doubt, Thanks in advance, - Tomasz