How can I store session variables that can be accessed even after the browser is closed?

You can take it a step further and use a cookieless session

in the web.config you can pass the session state key through the query string. After the user closes the browser it is possible to recreate the session. However your default setting on the server is 20 before the session expires.

In the system.web section of your web.config you can specify to pass the session state key as a query string.  

            <sessionState
                            mode="InProc"
                        cookieless="true"
                        timeout="5" />

I want to warn you that your site could be session hijacked if somebody had the url in the users browser. I like it because i can copy the url from firefox to IE and transfer the session from one browser to another while i am in the middle of debugging my application.

Oh, and as far as the cookie example you can store the session state key in a cookie on the users computer to attempt to resume the session. Although I would not recommend leaving lots of sessions on your server, they could be inadvertently cleared because of numerous reasons unrelated to the session time out. App Pools are cleared on schedules as well as when the server memory usage for an application exceeds it's configured thresholds.

Once it's being passed through as a query string it is free game as to read in the string and store it into a cookie file.

If the user accidentally closed the browser then they would open it back up and you would read the url that you stored inside of the value in your cookie and redirect them to the uri which would go right back into the session.

BTW, The web.config solution is the only way to latch onto an existing session through an ASP.Net application. But there is ways to generate your own key to try to make it more secure. The concern is based off the theory that these things use random number generators and that hackers may be able to reproduce the same exact key at the same time as ASP.Net would. I don't think it's likely but there are solutions out there to do some type of unique encryption scheme.

Thanks for the reply talker,

could you please post the C# version to that code?  I haven't worked with VB before but I'll see if I can make that work with C#.

On another note, I want to make sure that the cookie is deleted if the user logs out using the LoginStatus control.  Is there a way to delete the cookie on the event of a logout through the LoginStatus control?

I'm using cookies rather than session variables like you suggested and everything is working fine.

I also made sure that when the user logged out (using the LoginStatus control), I forced the existing cookies to expire:

HttpCookie cookie_userID = new HttpCookie("userID");
            cookie_userID.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1d);
            Response.Cookies.Add(cookie_userID);

Thanks!

I put down the code in C# and it works fine, thanks!