Just a thought on the cookie problem. A site that I'm hosting is having severe problems with PHP losing track of cookies/sessions, they just randomly die. The cookie is fine in the browser and the data on the server side looks perfectly OK, but for some reason it just doesn't work. Believing this was some bug in php 4.1.1 I did an upgrade yesterday but it didn't get better, so he has now posted a bug report to the PHP team about this. His site doesn't use threads, but maybe there could be some relation?