I downloaded and installed the latest version of xampp for windows - xampplite-win32-1.7.3.exe.
I copied from a server a site I made several years ago, to test a few things and upgrade them.
It uses $HTTP_POST_VARS and session_register to pass session variables from one page to another after users log in to update the database (so every page that can update the database is secured). This works quite happily on my clients' servers (three or four are using the same basic log-in scripts.)
However, it does NOT work on the new xampp server on my laptop (vista).
I have tried a couple of log-in scripts on the new localhost and none of them work. I uploaded one of these to a client's server, and it did work. php 4.4.8, MySQL 4.1.22 on one, and php 5.3 on another server.
So what is stopping $HTTP_POST_VARS and session variables from being passed from page to page in my local xampp? Is there some part of the local configuration that needs to be changed?
I am definitely NOT an expert at configuring apache or php, and if I changed something on my older PC (before it died) that made these log-in pages work, I can't remember it, as it was four years ago that I did the work. I'm also not an expert on sessions, I just used some code from a text book that worked.