Why am I losing Authenticated members when I upload site to production server?

>>Can someone tell me what is going on?  <<
Simply put you are confusing Logins with Users.  Logins are maintained in the Master database and you are restoring a regular database which only contains the Users.

Im assuming that you are talking about "users" in the term of users in a table, that you web application is then looking to that table to authenticate their username and password....?

Are you able to verify for fact that the Product application is connecting to your Production database? Is it posible that the connection string that it carried over is looking back at the development database, which may not be allowing it to connect?

If you are authenticating to a table, is the password encrypted? And if so, is your encryptions/decryption method going to work the same on the Production database as it does on the Development database? (Greatly depends on how it was programmed)

Mkrumpe  

I can see the users name in the db table but for some reason it just functions as if its not their.  I can recreate the account, using the same name and it works.  I dont know of any encryption being used.   I using the ASPNET provider in VWD 2008 for the account creation.

in addition to acperkins comment, when you restored a db, the logins do not get created/migrated automatically, as those are stored in the master db and not in your user db, which only contains the mapped user part.

to "fix", you can use this procedure: sp_change_users_login:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa259633(SQL.80).aspx

Thanks guys i got the answer.

It the application Id.  The machine your on create it, if not specified in the web.config file.  So when i create the db from the bk it seen the appid and thought it was from a different application.    Check out this article on it if your interested.

http://mishler.net/2006/04/06/AspNet+Provider+Model+ApplicationNames+And+The+ApplicationID.aspx

DotNetNuke does something simular with a machine id... it uses it as the key to encrypt and decrypt the passwords. You were probably running into that same scenario.