I am suffering a weird problem, well not me but our site members, it appears that protector does not like the safari browser to much.

Some users of Safari are being detected as crawlers , they can have issues logging in, and protector sends them to a nice blank page, it also appears to be upsetting the sessions table in my DB, a repair sorts it and the classic value in session php is already set to false (I assume this is part of 2.4.4 as I didn't need to alter it) I am using a custom session.

I never used to have this issue - because before my total rebuild of 2.4.4 although I had protector active it never detected anything (I had somehow upset it when doing upgrade rather than whole instal of xoops)

I did not twig this until last night, when I put safari on my PC and with in 5 minutes I was given the heave ho by protector at least I could appreciate what users were seeing as under firefox, opera and IE I didn't have these issues.

Is this a common problem or just one that our site throws up?

I reckon the links grabbing and caching safari does in the background is tripping up protector.

I wonder if this has also helped in some way, our site used to crawl at times, now if users were on and their browsers were downloading multiple pages it may go some way to explaining our performance issues in the past.

Anyone else seen similar?

Probably they use this preload feature, that tries to load all linked pages in advance, before the user clicks on the link, but when he does, the page is rendered immediatly.
As this produces a lot of wasted server load, ask them to switch this off.
In the Protector preferences the treshold can be enlarged.
Some modules as eg albums, can also make the browser posting a lot of requests eg to load all the pictures. These modules can be excluded in the preferences for this check.
Also repeaditly pushing F5 to refresh the screen, may trip Protector into dos attack detection. Ask your users to be calm and patient.

Safari is a more seldom used browser. Depending on your sites' content, you may attract more of them then usual (or in general). Propose a 'Viewed at its best with FireFox' link.