What I've concluded from this thread and what David has passed along is that you must configure whatever browser you use for this bb to accept cookies from the board and you must not allow your security program to delete cookies before you read the bb. If there are no cookies stored on your computer, you won't see the NEW flags on messages you haven't read. You also won't have the identity info prefilled for you when you first access the bb.

Norton Anti-Virus has a known quirk of deleting all your cookies after a security scan if you've told it to delete any third party cookies. My solution to this is just to leave the cookies alone and ignore the Norton messages that tell me my system may still be at risk. This has been a problem for about a year and it doesn't appear Norton is going to change anything.

Ultimately, Windows 10 will probably be the solution and I will no longer use Norton products for security.