I've hit this forwards and backwards and can't figure this out.

I was getting all kinds of erroneous results and to eliminate the
possibilty of my Trace class having problems I resorted to using some
System.out statements.  The results were even stranger:

My session object was acting buggy in my jsp page so I decided to call
it in the servlet just to see if I was still getting errors...

private void find
{
...
ArrayList al = (ArrayList)session.getAttribute("retailLogin");
System.out.println("TEST");
System.out.println("getAttribute: " + al.size());
..
}

Here is the output:

TEST

The second line isn't printing!  In fact I've tried getting the
al.size() info through a couple of ways, neither work.

Now get this part:  This only happens the first few times I run the
app.  If I try 2 times it will start working:

TEST
AL SIZE FROM JSP: 1

the 3rd time I ran it *NONE* of the System.outs worked throughout the
entire servlet

huh?!?!
Has anyone had similar problem?  Any solutions?
Much appreciated if anyone has any advice where to even start looking
for a solution.
Thanks