Custom sts in farm works on one server not on others

We setup a custom sts for sharepoint 2010 in our test environment which works as expected. But when reproducing the setup in production it doesn't  entirely work. Essentially we are able to login directly to one server just fine but on the other two server it would authenticate and then immediately get logged out. So the mystery is what is specific to each server that could effect the sts authentication process? We don't see anything in the logs that indicates any problem except the error "token cache entry missing" which some suggest to change logontokencacheexpirationwindow but that's a global setting so then why would it work on one of the servers in the farm.  Can anyone provide any insight or suggestions? I'm at a lost for the moment.