Why does the site sometimes 'throw me out'?
I get the blue bar across the top saying 'First time here?'.
If I refresh, it sometimes fixes the problem, other times not. But if I try to login again, I get a message telling me that I'm already logged in, and do I want to logout and sign in as this new user?
Could it be a cookie issue?
I'm on IE8.
Not sure. If it happens regularly, you may be better off posting your question on either http://meta.stackexchange.com or http://meta.stackoverflow.com - both those sites deal with the way that the platform itself works.
I think I know why this is, or, at least, what a contributing factor is. My OpenID comes from ClaimID and their service decided to stop working last week for about 16 hours. I couldn't log in at that time, and the site forgot who I was after a short while of it being down.
You can set up alternate OpenID logins in your profile, which is something I've done - I'll let you know if it seems to happen less under that configuration.
