php error msg: what and why?

SeenGee

I've got a site that is on the verge of going live and as always seems the case i get a weird problem at the last moment. At the end of a successful registration some vars are stored as session vars such as username etc. However, as soon as i then naviagte to a page that calls one of the session vars this message appears at the bottom of my script:

Warning: Unknown(): Your script possibly relies on a session side-effect which existed until PHP 4.2.3. Please be advised that the session extension does not consider global variables as a source of data, unless register_globals is enabled. You can disable this functionality and this warning by setting session.bug_compat_42 or session.bug_compat_warn to off, respectively. in Unknown on line 0

This only appears to happen once but thats once too often. I've seen a few posts on this subject that allude to something to do with register globals but no one seems to have explained exactly what is happening and why and i cant find anything on php.net either. Its obviously to do with sessions but beyond that i dont really know. Would really appreciate some help, thanks.

BTW:
PHP Version 4.3.4
Server: Windows NT

SeenGee

i've been told by someone that this could be something to do with register_globals and my use of session_register(). can anyone elaborate on this?

Thanks.

laserlight

I'm not sure of the exactly details of this myself, but generally consider:
Are you using the $_SESSION superglobal, or relying on any $variable_name type of incoming variable?
Do you use any deprecated session handling functions?

You'll have to check the PHP manual to confirm.

SeenGee

i'm registering session vars like this:

session_register('username');
$_SESSION['username'] = $finalusername;

and calling them in the other script like this:

$username = $_SESSION['username'];