[eluser]jrlooney[/eluser]
ok this might be it. So, the CI application has a separate header.php view for all the navigation at top. In the very top of that view, the user's login credentials are checked by calling a function inside of a helper - and that function uses get_instance() so that it can make use of the CI database class for querying the db.
Code:
$CI =& get_instance();
So, gonna try getting rid of that for now to see what happens.