I've resurrected a linux box that had RH7.something installed, current kernel is 2.8.18. Anyway, the user accounts (all one of them) I had setup before work fine. I can't for the life of me add a new one though, because the password doesn't seem to be getting handled correctly. When I do 'useradd -g mailer -p test mynewuser', an entry ends up in /etc/shadow that looks like mynewuser:test:...... In other words the cleartext password is in the shadow file. I can't change it or log in. If I specify no password (no -p) it doesn't work either. I've run the pwconv program, nothing seems to help. Any clues? I played with this for two hours and couldn't make any sense of it. I did find an article on line where someone had the same symptoms and pwconv fixed it, but I can't make it work. Thanks. Jim - lurker for years, but hope to contribute more.