Jason, thank you for your assistance. Can your solution be applied to the users_LogIn page?
Ideally, I would like to add the "shop as guest" link to the Login page instead of the cart page. That way, any current registered users can log in with their online credentials. You can see what I have done to my login page so far (see attachment). Currently, the checkout page redirects shoppers to the log in page.
I should note that I did add a session value to the cart page as you had requested. The session value was set to the "guest" URL variable. My login session variable is "UserID"