KevinTheJedi
One other thing to add...
This whole thing got me to thinking about why this is happening on our new system and never happened on the old one. The old version was v1.12.x and we never had this problem. Yet when I search on it, I find others that have reported it all the way back to v1.9.x. So what is different between the old and new systems. Both systems are VM running in the same cluster so the physical hardware is the same. The old VM only had one processor and 1Gb RAM assigned to it. The new VM has two processors and 4Gb RAM assigned to it. There is a very noticeable performance difference in page loads and interacting with the server in general.
I believe what's happening is that the server is processing page loads so fast that it is over running the session id stuff. Especially since I know that authentication is working correctly and it is correctly redirecting to the next page after login, but since the session id cookie stuff isn't getting there before the page loads, the PHP assumes you are not logged in and therefore is displaying the login content again.
Hopefully this help for future development in getting everything to process in order and consistently display correctly.
@KevinTheJedi if you want to DM me I'm happy to help out with this in any way I can.
Cheers!!