Innappropriate message - Your Movable Type session has ended

This person experienced the same thing:

http://forums.sixapart.com/lofiversion/index.php/t65438.html

Restarting the browser and/or clearing MT's cookies always fixes this for me.

You may also be guilty of using tabs in your browser as your session times out. Once one has timed out (and you have logged back in), the others will keep you logged out, as they are different sessions.

I have a problem with this as well.

You may want to explore the UserSessionTimeout configuration directive to keep you logged in (but be aware of any potential security issues that this may raise.

http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/config-directives/usersessiontimeout.html

Closing Firefox didn't help. Clearing Firefox's cookies didn't help. A night with the machine logged out and turned off didn't help.

Is there another meaning to 'clearing MT's cookies' other than 'clear private data' in my Firefox browser?

I upgraded to the latest version. Now I get an error:
-------------------------------------------------------

Upgrading database...
Upgrading table for Session records...

* Upgrading database from version 4.0070.
* Upgrading table for Session records...

Error during upgrade: failed to execute statement CREATE TABLE mt_session ( session_id varchar(80) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, session_data mediumblob, session_email varchar(255), session_kind varchar(2), session_name varchar(255), session_start integer NOT NULL ): Table 'mt_session' already exists at lib/MT/Upgrade.pm line 2593.

So I looked at the database.

Table mt_session is marked as crashed and should be repaired.

I just dropped the crashed table, and the upgrade proceeded properly from then on, presumably replacing the table when needed.

OK, so I got hammered by this late last evening. It was, as jfrancis noted above, a damaged mt_session table on the MT database.

Now this happened on xampp off localhost which, as it turns out, is an enormous blessing. I backup the xampp folder to an external drive, and also have it running on a notebook. The trouble was on the desktop PC, so I logged in to the notebook's xampp installation, went off to phpMyAdmin there, and exported the mt_session table (and only that table). Back on the PC, I dropped the damaged mt_session table, and imported it from the export sql.gz file I'd made off the notebook.

Up and running, and in no time.

But you absolutely must have a parallel system or, at the very least, an export of the table (doesn't matter how old it is as long as the username/password is the same).

I've now taken the precaution of exporting the mt_session table from the PC installation too.

I just ran into this same error on an installation running 4.35. Two of us were having the same issue on opposite coasts so I knew it wasn't just a Firefox cache problem. Once you logged in you would be automatically logged out on any link you tried to click through. The error showed that "Table ../mt_session is marked as crashed and should be repaired." It ended up being a pretty straightforward fix.

After reading all of the comments above I thought I'd try to see if I could just use the "Repair table" function in phpMyAdmin before using the DROP function or importing a backed-up table.

I logged into phpMyAdmin, backed up the related database, selected the table mt_session and chose "Repair table" from the drop down menu. I received a message that the table was empty (I thought it was an error message), but when I went back to look at the mt_session table it had been repaired/rebuilt.

I logged back into the MT installation and all was well again.