When I try to log in the administrators front end of a Joomla installation – nothing happens, no login event, no error message, nothing but the refresh of the login page.

I did try to find a solution in the official Joomla forum
but all I got there was a suggestion to change the session_path parameter by inserting a pointer in the .htaccess file. After doing so nothing seemed to have changed.

After investigating the cause if found out that the problem it occurred after a colleague of mine made changes to the php.ini switching off the following parameter
session.use_cookies = 0
on a unix installation. He needed to change this parameter in order to get one application running, which caused Joomla to loose track of login attempts.

The walk around of this problem is to place the following entry in the .htaccess file:
php_value session.use_cookies ‘On’
this will enable the feature “session use cookies”.