Update: Zinc appears to have the same session-ignorance issue as SWFStudio. I'm not surprised, but I'm still sad. Or disappointed. Maybe both?

I'm at a bit of an impasse. What I really mean is that I feel like the Israelites, standing on the Egyptian side of the Red Sea (before Moses does his little thing with the staff) and wondering, "How the heck am I gonna get out of this?!"

I have a project that, for various aesthetic and accessibility reasons, places a browser on top of an underlying SWF. Both SWFStudio and Zinc have objects and methods for accomplishing this task; however, pop-ups are proving to be the bane of my existence.

I've been doing most of my recent work with Northcode's SWFStudio (3.5). Honestly, it's a great, "low-profile" program for extending SWF projectors. In fact, for everything else I've used it, it's worked great. The forums are usually rife with people willing to go the extra mile to help you understand something.

However, since roughly July, I've been banging my head against a wall trying to figure out how to coax pop-up windows that need to remain "session-aware" to believe me when I tell them that it's okay, we're really dealing with the same session here!

I understand that with SWFStudio, the embedded browser isn't actually the "real" Internet Explorer (IE); rather, it's an expression of a collection of assets that Internet Explorer employs, which gives the embedded browser the general "feel" of IE. The general feel, but not the real deal: when a user launches a pop-up from within the embedded browser (e.g., American Airlines), if that pop-up needs "proof" that he's coming from an authentic session, you'll get screamed and yelled at. It appears (to me) that when the user launches the pop-up, he's now creating an actual instance of IE (complete with bells and whistles). To the web site, it appears as though two different browsers are claiming to be the same person, when technically they're not.

My next trick -- and, honestly, my last trick -- is recreating an example with Zinc (3.0.10 now, I think) and seeing how far I get with that approach. If it works, I'll have to retool other portions of my project to use Zinc's objects and methods, but honestly, right now I just want something that does the trick. (Zinc has also been a great tool to work with; in fact, the only reason I switched to SWFStudio [originally] was because its browser instances had difficulty launching the print dialog. And, apparently, its inability to remain stable after installation )

I guess we'll see what happens...And if anyone's seen Moses, please send him my way!