still losing session userdata across a redirect

That's exactly what I thought too. I changed something while following all the directions that now makes it work. I don't think it was the reversal of writing  to to session data and redirect. The main changes I made were 

a) changed all controllers to upper case
b) used urlencode and base64encode to get rid of the @ in the email address before writing to userdata
c) changed the sess_save_path 

The sess save path is still  $config['sess_save_path'] = APPPATH.'cache'; 

But now my debugger is not working. When I check with Web Server Debug Validation if fails with a 404 error. 

proof that an old dog can learn new tricks