Session data disappearing on redirect

[eluser]pornnarnold[/eluser]
Further progress, I've been debugging the Session library and I found that an error was causing sess_read to fail.

The log error was: 'The session cookie data did not match what was expected. This could be a possible hacking attempt.'

What I've found from my hacking is that the cookie function of the input class is adding in slashes to the cookie data. As an example:

Code:

a:5:{s:10:\"session_id\";s:32:\"f322bbbc2aefde3ebf9e04e106f85ccc\";s:10:\"ip_address\";s:13:\"xx.xxx.xxx.xx\";s:10:\"user_agent\";s:50:\"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) App\";s:13:\"last_activity\";i:1310311640;s:4:\"test\";s:4:\"test\";}

I've tried setting the cookie to encrypt which would bypass this validation check function but that made no difference, so the issue must run deeper than just this but I feel like I'm making progress.

Does anyone know why the $this->input->cookie() function would be adding in or not removing slashes?