Yes, it's being stored in the database.
Like I said, it works 100%, everything works fine, ONLY when I go to the login script via a POST operation. I'm not even passing anything via the POST, just the action of doing a POST seems to properly initialize and persist these cookies.
So worst case, I just setup a dummy page that submits itself to my login script and everything else will work... but this just isn't a clean way of doing it. There must be something I'm missing about how cookies are initialized and how they work on the server end of things.