User Password No Longer Works

[Boricua]

Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere, but I found nothing similar. One of my machines all of a sudden is rejecting my wife's password as user. After she hits the "enter" key for her username and start typing her password, instead of seeing one symbolic character for each letter she types (like "*"), she sees three ("***") and of course login fails. A defective keyboard as a possible cause has been already ruled out. This is one of two machines I upgraded from F9 to F10 by means of preupgrade, with minimum problems. The other upgraded computer is doing just fine. Any hints?

[ryptyde]

Can you login as root and change the password or create another user account and see if it behaves the same. Glad you ruled out a sticky key that would have been my first guess also.

[Boricua]

Originally Posted by ryptyde

Can you login as root and change the password or create another user account and see if it behaves the same. Glad you ruled out a sticky key that would have been my first guess also.

Thanks for responding ryptyde. Unfortunately, the machine is at my wife's office so it will take some time for me to reach it. I'm indeed planning to start the machine on init 3 and try to login as root. I'will also try your suggestion of creating a new user. I will report back after finding the cause .

[Boricua]

A friend of mine took a look to the machine and found out the problem in the xorg.conf file (it was necessary to create it in the first place under F9 because the system didn't get the correct numbers for the flat panel monitor). My friend didn't give specific details of what went wrong, but told me the keyboard parameters were somehow modified (probably due to a recent update) and the keyboard was typing three letters instead of one. Weird. Hope this report helps someone else along the road .