After my most recent upgrade to Linux Mint 11 (and the resultant upgrade to latest Firefox), I started running into an issue on the Charles Schwab site. I could log in fine and see my account info, but as soon as I clicked on something “outside” (news story links, or Morningstar research, etc.) then I would encounter a weird situation. The linked page would display for a second or two and then the screen would refresh and I’d find myself tossed out and back at the login page with a message
Your session has either timed out or has not been correctly established. Please sign on again.
This was extremely frustrating. Googling resulted in a couple of other folks having similar issues on another platform, but no solution. The few things that had similar reports back from earlier days talked a lot about cookies. I wondered, “is this a cookie problem”?
So I looked at my cookie settings and one thing stuck out for me: “Accept Third Party Cookies” was not checked. Where this was about going “off” the main Schwab site, I tried enabling this option. Bing! The issue is resolved and now I can load these other pages and stay logged in. I don’t like the solution, as it requires me to accept cookies for sites I am not specifically planning to visit. But at least I can stay on Schwab now when I want to. I’ll most likely simply turn this option on and off as I visit Schwab until there is a longer term solution. If I can find some sort of advanced cookie management plug-in for Firefox, then that might be a longer term fix.