session auto start not working

[highonlife]

Im running xampp under windows XP for development. For some reason, i cant get the sessions to start automatically.
If i add "session_start()" at the top of each page, it works fine, but that is starting to be a pain.
Ive already changed the following in php.ini

; Initialize session on request startup.
session.auto_start = On

ive also tried it with

; Initialize session on request startup.
session.auto_start = 1


neither works. Any ideas t what i should look for?

[highonlife]

It seems my session files are all 0kb in size.
I read somewhere else in the forum that we should change the save path to "0;600;c:\xampp\tmp".
I tried that, and it still doesnt work.