[Ratings] Can't get voting to work when user first logs in

Hi - I wrote an earlier post on this, but have since made more discoveries. Am so close to fixing this... In short, when a user logs in to my Gallery, the voting doesn't work - click and click on the stars and nothing happens. If I refresh/reload the page, now the voting works.

I have an embedded install with a custom theme in which I have a unified login with bbPress.
- http://mydomain.com/gallery.php contains the GalleryEmbed::init code
- the login form is included in the gallery template (sidebar.tpl)
- http://mydomain.com/forum/bb-login.php is the login processor

bb-login.php redirects to gallery.php when the bbPress login is complete. I then use the bbPress login id as $uid and call GalleryEmbed::checkActiveUser($uid). This produces the page, and from what I can tell the login was successful because the user can do other security-related actions, such as edit photo. Nonetheless, no one can vote until they hit "refresh" on gallery.php. Any ideas?

Gallery version = 2.2.2 core 1.2.0.4
PHP version = 5.2.0 cgi-fcgi
Webserver = Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635.SR1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.28 OpenSSL/0.9.7a PHP-CGI/0.1b
Database = mysqli 5.0.27-standard-log, lock.system=flock
Toolkits = NetPBM, Gd
Acceleration = none, none
Operating system = Linux box251.bluehost.com 2.6.21-3_1.BHsmp #1 SMP Fri Jun 1 09:45:19 MDT 2007 x86_64
Default theme = dixie