Changes have been made in Git (master):

commit b757bc902f25e1338c6355eeda096548f1b1b03c
Author: Michael M Slusarz <slusarz@horde.org>
Date:   Fri Jun 21 11:35:55 2013 -0600

     Restore old session data if we had to create a new session

     Bug #11573

  .../Core/lib/Horde/Core/Factory/SessionHandler.php |    1 +
  1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

http://git.horde.org/horde-git/-/commit/b757bc902f25e1338c6355eeda096548f1b1b03c

Hi Michael,

your fix is not complete. You've to restore the reference stored in 
Session::_data after destroying the session.

This should do the trick:

Changes have been made in Git (master):

commit 62843c0e3d9aabf827c7b16355ec3f05bc19a8fa
Author: Michael M Slusarz <slusarz@horde.org>
Date:   Tue Apr 23 15:56:42 2013 -0600

     Fix session data access when calling from command line (Bug #11573)

  .../Core/lib/Horde/Core/Factory/SessionHandler.php |    5 +++--
  framework/Core/lib/Horde/Session.php               |   13 +++++++++++++
  2 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

http://git.horde.org/horde-git/-/commit/62843c0e3d9aabf827c7b16355ec3f05bc19a8fa

A fix is to use
$GLOBALS['session']->start();
instead of
session_start();
in Horde/Core/Factory/SessionHandler.php

And someone please reopen this ticket.

I hope my comment will reopen the issue.

I've tried to debug this and I think this never worked (at least with 
PHP 5.4):
* cli access creates the horde session with setup(start=false, ...). 
Thus session_start() will never be called, so there's no session and 
the $GLOBALS['session']->_data property is just a reference to a 
"normal" array.
* as there's no valid session, Horde/Core/Factory/SessionHandler.php 
will call session_start() (in the stub branch) which in turn will 
convert the reference into a normal array (I've no idea what php is 
doing here in it's internals). But I guess this is the reason for the 
additional assignment of $this->_data = &$_SESSION after calling 
session_start() in Horde_Session::_start(...).
* since the connection between $_SESSION and 
$GLOBALS['session']->_data is lost, all calls of 
$GLOBALS['session']->get(...) will be non sense and the function will 
return false
* this is working in hordes frontend because the other branch will be 
used ($new_sess = false)

You will need to debug then.  I can't reproduce.

session.auto_start is disabled. I checked before filling the bug 
report. Thanks

Works perfectly fine here.  Sounds like you have session.auto_start on 
in PHP, which the installation documentation explicitly tells you to 
disable.

I am using memcache as session handler and In admin interface I can 
see the Current sessions in admin/sessions.php . Although when trying 
to use the horde-active-sessions script from cli it produces the 
following error.
HORDE: [horde] PHP ERROR: ini_set(): A session is active. You cannot 
change the session module's ini settings at this time [pid 8335 on 
line 97 of "/usr/share/php/Horde/SessionHandler.php"]