When a user logs into the portal, and then selected preferences, and "save preferences on logout" is set to true, and then they let their session timeout, the next time they return to the portal, they'll see the footer only.

It appears that this is because the Structure Stylesheet User Preference 'userLayoutRoot' is being set to 'ctf1' when you enter preferences, and if your session expires this is saved, but you can't log back into the portal directly on the preferences page.

As a fix to this, in the finishedSession() method of UserPreferencesManager.java, I've added the following code to reset all of a user's userLayoutRoots to 'root'. Maybe not the perfect solution, but it does halt the problem.

public void finishedSession(HttpSessionBindingEvent bindingEvent) {
        // persist the layout and user preferences
        try {
            if(saveUserPreferencesAtLogout) {
                // DUKE MCY Fix for losing layout if session expires mid stream
                StructureStylesheetUserPreferences ssup = complete_up.getStructureStylesheetUserPreferences();
                if (!ssup.getParameterValue("userLayoutRoot").equals("root")) {
                    Hashtable ht = ssup.getParameterValues();
                    ht.put("userLayoutRoot", "root");
                    ssup.setParameterValues(ht);
                }
                // End
                ulsdb.putUserPreferences(m_person, complete_up);
                ulm.saveUserLayout();
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            log.error("UserPreferencesManager::finishedSession() : unable to persist layout upon session termination !", e);
        }
    }