Environment variable problem after upgrade

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I am experiencing a problem with the REMOTE_USER environment variable
after an upgrade to Apache 2. We are using AuthDBI to authenticate
users, which uses basic authentication with the browser to request
their details. Hence the use of REMOTE_USER.

Users authenticate fine and seem to be working with no problems, but
when there are multiple people using the system the REMOTE_USER
environment variable gets set to seemingly random user names, and the
users keep stepping on each other. The CGI module is being used and
initially I thought the problem was there, as the username is
retrieved ala "$USER =3D remote_user", however after looking at the
CGI.pm code, all it does is return the value of the REMOTE_USER
environment variable.

Unfortunately it seems that the AuthDBI module has not been ported to
the Apache2/mod_perl2 APIs, so we have to run it under the
compatibility layer. Ech! Any known problems there?

Looks to me like the environment variables aren't being reset
correctly after each request, and they are sticking around with the
Apache process.

I tried logging "$r->user()" to see if that was more reliable, but no
luck there either. It seems to be empty more than wrong, so I guess it
is doing something different, but still no good. Maybe it is
indicative of where the problem lies though.

Thinking of anything else that might be useful in solving this problem:

Apache MPM: prefork
PerlHandler ModPerl::Registry
Apache 2.0.46
mod_perl 1.99_09
Perl 5.8.0
OS Linux 2.4.21-20.0.1 smp
Distribution RHELv3

This code has been running under mod_perl1 for a few years now, so the
problems seem to be related to the software upgrade, rather than the
usual problems related to bad scripts.

Any help would be gladly appreciated as I have an application that is
basically unusable at the moment. Please ask questions if you need
more info.

Thanks!
Owen Berry