Captive Portal disconnecting users

Hi, i'm brand new to the mailing list but have searched google over
including anything in the lists that returns "captive portal" and have not
found any solution or similar situation. 

I have been using m0n0wall for a while now and have a number of machines
using it (> 20). using a Soekris net4801 and a simple access point. I have
experienced issues with keeping a user connected for more than a minute.
After altering the settings to mostly every combination, i have noticed no
change in average time the user is allowed access. This includes
enable/disabling mac filtering, concurrent connections, concurrent logins,
hard / idle timeouts, bandwidth limiting, logout popup (which doesn't come
up either way). Problem persists using "no authentication" and "local
users", radius auth methods have not been tested. Also this occurs using
direct connections to the interface as well as access point usage. 

I don't understand how i had good results with the captive portal for
about a month,
now does not work as expected. 

any additional information about how the captive portal is functioning in
the background would be helpful.
any additional information about my setup that may be of use for debugging
is readily available, though i have provided what i think is most useful. 

thanks guys!  
 MyOwnSOHO
 +1 914 613 3334
 +1 866 644 7760
 [email protected]
 http://www.myownsoho.com