integration with phpBB on an entirely "different" level

[grv]

I have been trying to integrate phpBB and Coppermine gallery. I opted for Coppermine after a lot of problems using 4images gallery. In my case, the site has been designed in such a way that the user requires to be logged in through the index page, and the user-name and password is checked against a "master table", and if verified, the scripts login.php for the forum and gallery are "included" into the main logging in script, Obviously, the login.php scripts of phpBB and the gallery (4images before) have been modified. (Do not ask me why this was done, it was this way and I was asked to fix problems with the site. So I cannot even use the bridge because I'd have to modify all scripts on the main level.). Anyways, I modified the scripts so that when logging in through the index page, the user is authenticated and the main session as well as the phpBB session is created as well. However, Coppermine does not allow the logging in to proceed. I mean , i modified the source of login.php to check for the master session, and if one exists, log the user in automatically. (I explicitly assigned the values of $HTTP_POST_VARS in the login.php script). When going to /gallery/index.php after successful login to the main index page, the message "Welcome user" is displayed, and the site redirects to the /gallery/index.php script. However, unlike in the phpBB source that uses sessions to manage user logins, the cookies in Coppermine seem to be improperly registered in my case , or in most probability, it must've been that I have messed up the code somehow.

I would be thankful if anyone could please tell me the method in which the overall login and the index.php script execution after successful login works. Just a little concept may help me, so I hope you will take a little time to help me.

Waiting for a helpful reply,
- grv

P.S.: The databases are updated, and all variables are "in-sync" as far as I'm concerned, or the  Welcome "User" message would never appear before being redirected. This is the reason why I have not created a test user account, you do not need to go through the hassle of checking the database verification part.