Hi funky,
I understand that it's a setting in the config.php file. I'm just trying to confirm that your solution suggestion is to set that to FALSE.
The problem is, that's not an acceptable solution for me since one of the stores I'm working on piggybacks on another SSL domain. (The domain the store runs on does not have its own SSL cert.) In order to do that -- have a different HTTP host and a different HTTPS host -- sessions MUST be stored in MySQL. Therefore, I cannot just set the $store_sessions_in_mysql to FALSE to solve the page-loading problem ... since that will create a NEW problem -- customers cannot check out.
So -- the question is: WHY does setting $store_sessions_in_mysql to FALSE make this page display problem go away? I've been looking through some code to try to determine that, and haven't seen anything jump out at me just yet.
-Clay
PS -- For anyone following this thread, I tried upgrading to Smarty-2.3.1, and it did not make a difference in this problem.