I experienced something similar a while back when I tarred up a live instance of a wordpress installation and fired it up on my local machine. To deal with redi

I experienced something similar a while back when I tarred up a live instance of a wordpress installation and fired it up on my local machine. To deal with redirects, I changed /etc/hosts to resolve the live domain to the local IP. While I was working on the local copy, I would from time to time need to refer to the live instance. To do this, I'd comment out the entry in /etc/hosts and browse to the live site. At some point, I noticed that the theme for the live site had been set back to the default. When I investigated, it turned out that my session credentials for the local instance were honored by the live (remote) site. The odd thing about this is that I hadn't been given the admin password for the remote-live wordpress instance. I had manually modified the database to change the admin password in order to work on the local instance before firing it up. I never did look into how wordpress created or verified session credentials, but it did seem like something odd was going on, there.