After upgrade to 0.5.3, I had same problem, but I didn't want to change 'session_lifetime'
I fixed this on my server by leaving the 'session_lifetime' at the default, but I changed the date.timezone variable in my php.ini from US/Eastern to UTC even though I really am in US/Eastern.
from php.ini ....
[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
;date.timezone = "US/Eastern"
date.timezone = "UTC"