Customers Losing Carts

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   In the last few months, we've had increasing numbers of customers complain that their cart gets lost, and sometimes I've managed to replicate it.
It only happens to customers who are logged in. And only to people who have left their cart for a period of time, perhaps a half-hour or more.  

The rest is a little hazy.

Some of them had a named saved cart that got lost; others lost their only (default-named) cart.

Here are some of my test results:

1) I logged in at 9:08 with 3 items already in my cart. I didn't name my cart; I walked away and returned at 9:54 - the cart was gone.  (I did not make a note of what page I left it sitting at.)

2) Logged in, Saved cart with name "Testing" - Searched for an item, then sat at the search screen and went to a meeting. Returned an hour later - cart was gone. No cart named Testing, and top default-named cart was an old date with old items.  

3) Same test, same results, but I left it sitting at the View Cart page.

I believe I've gotten this message each time:
Your cart is empty.

View saved shopping carts. (You may need to log back in.) Thank you!

4) I did a long series of tests with named carts and had some very strange results. Sometimes my newest-named cart was gone, but the PREVIOUSLY-named cart had my newest cart's items!
I can write this up too, but it's rather long and messy so if you don't need it, I'd rather not.

We don't currently have any add-ons for saved carts or saved sessions, since the session saver is now built in, and the carts SAVE fine; they just sometimes disappear.  I assume it happens when the customer gets auto-logged out.

The only setting we can find for saved carts is for restoring them when returning to the store, and that works fine. (It always works when you weren't logged in.)

It *generally* seems that if you left our site / closed your browser promptly after the last time you viewed your cart, you were safe.   

We can't retrieve these orders for our customers, because they didn't actually go through checkout and get to the Payment page, so there is nothing in the Incompletes. They are just plain gone.

Help!