After adding personalization and authentication to my site, I was getting pitched out of my application( which is on a hosted server), and sent back to the log in screen . I disabled authentication to see if I could figure out what was going on. I found that I was getting a system error:
Validation of viewstate MAC failed. If this application is hosted by a Web Farm or cluster, ensure that <machineKey> configuration specifies the same validationKey and validation algorithm. AutoGenerate cannot be used in a cluster.
This error has been reported elsewhere
http://forums.asp.net/p/955145/1173230.aspx#1173230
so I made the following change to my web.config
<pages theme="Theme1" enableViewStateMac="false" enableEventValidation="false" viewStateEncryptionMode="Nev ...
Go to the complete details ...