Session problem in websphere

[vamsi bezawada]

Hi everybody,
I have the following problem. I am using WAS 3.5.5 for my project with session persistance enabled. One time in my portal, i have a link which calls the external URL. For this link i pass the sessionId as parameter and to come back from external page to my portal i add this sessionId parameter to my servlet link..
like http://host/xxxServlet;jsessionID=XX123TFTZAGAGFAF?Button=start
But the problem is URL Encoding in websphere adds the session with cacheID from the sessions table like http://host/xxxServlet;jsessionID=0001XX123TFTZAGAGFAF?Button=start
So when call the above URL from ext. page it can't find the sessionId passed with that URL and creates new session.
Strange thing it worked well till yesterday and now does't.
If anybody has any idea would be grateful...
Thanks in advance,
vamsi.