I had my php.ini session.save_path completely messed up - not pointing to
an existing directory and I think the syntax was also wrong.
I had three symptoms
* If I would log in and return to the previous page, I wouldn't show up as
logged in (This is a documented symptom in the
mediawiki.org help)
* If I was logged in and tried to save an edited page, the Wiki would act
as if I'd pressed Preview. If I wasn't logged in, the edit could be saved.
* If I used the Wiki in IE, many pages would be blank. View page source
showed nothing between <BODY> and </BODY>. When I would preview an edit
in IE, it also would have an empty body.
Once I fixed the php.ini setting, everything was happy.
My setup was MediaWiki 1.4.4, Apache 2.0.54, PHP 5.0.4 and MySql 4.1.12.
Is this of enough general interest that I should elaborate on the section
about session.save_path in the mediawiki.org's help?
Bill Smith