SharedObject persisting between browser tabs

Question

I'm building an online app which opens a SharedObject at its onset to do various things, one being remember whether a user has performed a certain action(vote) before because he/she is only permitted to perform this action once. This is all working fine, until our users began opening a new tab before voting.
If the user opens a new tab, and open the same application, this app(tab 2) needs to know if subsequently the user votes in tab 1. I thought this would be straightforward to resolve. However - for some reason, the sharedObject in tab 2 does not seem to update with updates in tab 1... if you were to refresh tab 2, it would have the updates, but while it is open, the data in the sharedobject does not seem to update.
It all works fine in general, the only time it doesn't is when there are two instances of a flash object open at the same time using the shared object. Maybe this is expected behaviour, and two flash objects can not use the same local sharedObject? It's hard to find this info in the livedocs.
This is the sort of code I am using to manage the SharedObject: (I know the first question anyone will have is, are you the flushing the object after setting your variable, the answer is yes!)
// i call this function at the beginning of the app
public function init(sharedObjectName:String):void
     sharedObject = SharedObject.getLocal(sharedObjectName,"/");
public function getVariable(varName:String):String {
     if (sharedObject.data.hasOwnProperty(varName)) {
          return(sharedObject.data[varName]);
     } else {
          return('');
public function setVariable(varName:String,varContents:String):void {
     sharedObject.setProperty(varName,varContents);
     sharedObject.flush();

Answer 1

Thanks kglad, but unfortunately I had actually tried that out and it didn't help:
public function init(sharedObjectName:String):void
     sharedObject = SharedObject.getLocal(sharedObjectName,"/");
     soName=sharedObjectName;
public function getVariable(varName:String):String {
     init(soName);
     if (sharedObject.data.hasOwnProperty(varName)) {
          return(sharedObject.data[varName]);
     } else {
          return('');
public function setVariable(varName:String,varContents:String):void {
     sharedObject.setProperty(varName,varContents);
     sharedObject.flush();