New user registration message with e-mail approval required

Okay, I've done more exploring and here is the situation. In the user.module, the method user_register_submit does set the appropriate message for the specific drupal setting. In my case, since email verification is required, the message reads "Your password and further instructions have been sent to your e-mail address." Now, if I insert a debug statement when this message is set, I do see the message as being added to the SESSION object:

  function user_register_submit($form, &$form_state) { ...
       print_r($_SESSION); //prints out: Array ( [messages] => Array ( [status] => Array ( [0] => Your password and further instructions have been sent to your e-mail address. ) ) )
...} 

However, this and any other message set from the user.module seem to disappear once the form is fully processed. That is, the message does not exist when the form submission is processed, regardless of url redirection. In particular, if I check the messages or _SESSION variables from page.tpl.php, they are both empty.

Of course messages do work for all other cases/content. In particular, messages I have added to my own pages work. If I use the drupal_set_message method to set messages, I do see the message displayed (regardless of url redirection).

This has been very frustrating and I am not sure how to proceed. I appreciate any comment on this.

I've more updates. It seems the problem is specifically this version of drupal seems to ignore all messages on a redirect for anonymous users. Specifically, if a page sets messages but does not redirect (via drupal_goto() for example), then the message is displayed. If the page sets a message then redirects to another, the message is lost. For authenticated user, that is not the case. Messages are always shown regardless of redirection.

What a complete waste of time.

The problem has always been the fact I had deleted (or rather changed) users table uid=0. Apparently this table is needed for drupal to properly initialized the SESSION variable. Without session, no persistent messages. Since of course the users table uid column is a 'int(10) unsigned auto_increment', most attempts to add a new user with uid=0 will fail. The key here is to modify the column and remove unsigned. Drupal doesn't care. And in most cases, what used to be uid=0 is incremented to be the last user in the uses table. So, just modifying that user to have uid=0 is sufficient. You may need to rest your auto_increment start value (ALTER TABLE users AUTO_INCREMENT=###).

Problem solved.

Many many discussions on this topic btw. For example, see: http://drupal.org/node/262669, http://drupal.org/node/353428

I am closing this with the following comment: drupal should stop using (or at least requiring such a fake user exist in the users table) uid=0 to establish anonymous user. There has to be a better way.