session variable dropping

I am really getting frustrated by this thing. This is a really interesting problem.

I've got a page that builds an sql statement, then I store that in a cookie. On my menu, I check the contents of the cookie, and if it's not empty, I provide a link to the page, using the statement in the cookie to hit the database. That way, they have a link for "last search".

Anyway, here's the problem. I noticed that when the pages would load, sporadically the cookie would be reset to "", and there was nothing in it. It did not always happen. I believe that there is a limit to the number of cookies you can use per domain, so I decided to try using a session variable instead. Now, I have found out that the session itself is dropping, as if the user's login had expired. I'm really not sure why that would be happening.

The site uses frames, could this be posing a problem?

Is there a limit to the number of session variables you can use?

Any idea why this might be happening? Is there some setting on the server itself that might have been changed that might affect this?

do you have buffering i think it's called turned on? Cookies are browser level so you can't write to them once something has been written to the browser...ergo, your cookie may be blank

Of course, he's using session variables now...

I may just go through the hassle of changing it back to cookies just to try the buffering. No...I hadn't thought of that.

Did some research on it. I'm convinced that it's because the session variables are not persisting between frames.

Ultimately, I'd like to tell my boss to give me a week to re-write the site w/out frames (I did not originally write it), but for the time being, it looks like cookies will have to be used. I think when the session variable isn't found, it's causing the cookies to drop somehow.