I don't get the perception either that people believe that cookies somehow slow down your system. this doesn't make any sense to me, though I certainly wouldn't claim to be the last word on the matter.
but there's no reason I know of that cookies would effect your page load time. a cookie file is merely a very small text file, and there's nothing real mysterious about it.
put yourself in the shoes of a programmer for just a minute. pretend that you want to keep track of the most recent visit to the site, for each user. by doing this we could, for example, display a little message that says 'your last visit was Dec. 14, 2004'. or something like 'this person has not visited for 59 days'. as the programmer, you could accomplish this by watching each login and storing the time and date each time someone visits. the 'where' to store it is a cookie file. so someone logs in, the system makes a note of it, and saves a tiny little file on my computer containing a date/time value of my visit. the next time I return, the system knows what little file to look for, and retrieves the date/time value that was stored. there's more to it than that of course, but that's the basics. because these files are so small, they can be saved and read very quickly and should not slow down the loading of pages.
our forum software does appear to store a password cookie on your machine, but it's encrypted (meaning jumbled up, and only the program that created it knows the key to unjumble it). I presume that this has something to do with allowing for automatic logins, though I don't know that for sure.
to your question about resetting your password, yes, any computer anywhere should recognize your password and allow you to login. that's because your password is stored permanently by the system itself. if you login 10 times today from 10 different locations then yes, it should always recognize your password.
the question I can't answer for you is what will happen if you don't have cookies enabled and try to login. I believe the ultimate answer is that the software relies on the ability to save and read these cookie files and won't function correctly (ie, remember who you are) without them.
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- Daven
Needs a sig
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