[ic] Country variable lost when logging out

[Interchange user]

Howdy.

If I log in and log out again, and then go to the checkout page, my shipping 
routine is not returning anything. I have found that this is because the 
[value country] variable that is normally passed to it is lost upon logging 
out. It will stay this way until I hit 'recalculate', change the country, or 
log back in, even if I go to another page and then come back to the checkout 
page.

How can I make sure that a country is *always* selected?

Also, I have made all the necessary changes to set the default country to UK; 
works fine, except for when I log out and go back to the checkout page - the 
highlighted country is US. According to the code in checkout.html, this 
should only happen if 'US' is the currently selected country (which is not 
the case, as mentioned above). My guess is that this will work properly when 
the above problem is sorted out, but why is this happening?

Thank you!