PHP: Indirect modification of overloaded property

I'm facing a problem on PHP 5.3.6, I'm getting the following error:

 Indirect modification of overloaded property CI_Session::$form_certs has no effect

I read about it and found an ugly solution to an old PHP 5.2.x bug from 2007 here.

But in my case it's not the __get() method causing the error but the __set() method.

My code looks like this:

class CI_Session{
    __set($name,$val){
       return $_SESSION[$name] = $val; 
    }
}

And the line causing the error:

$this->session->form_cert['foo'] = 'bar'; //$this->session is an instance of CI_Session

I have tried explicitly setting $this->session->form_cert = array(); before doing the above but the problem persists.

I also tested this on PHP 5.3.3 and had the same results.

What can I do开发者_Go百科 besides using this old workaround (that screws up another 500+ lines of code I have already written)? (Is this the same bug? Why would it still exist in 5.3.6?)