You haven't provided any useful code for what you are trying to accomplish, so I'm going to guess.
I have encountered a problem similar to this as well.
My issue was simply trying to persist a page number from the paginator so I could perform an operation on a record and then return to the same page in the previous action.
The problem I was having was that the controller would overwrite the session data every time I called the action (page refresh), so while the page number would persist to other actions as soon as I called the original action the session would be over written and the page would reset to 1.
My solution was to get the page number from the view script and then feed it back to the controller later.
//the view script
<?php $session = new Zend_Session_Namespace('page'); $page = $this->paginator->getCurrentPageNumber(); ?>
so now when call $session->page
anywhere in my controller/actions the data is still there and doesn't overwrite until the view is actually rendered, which is exactly what I needed.
You may be encountering something similar. Because of the way PHP and Zend Framework operate you may be inadvertently over writing your session data.
If this doesn't help, please provide more information and maybe an answer can be found.
Hope this provides some help or at least hints.