Corrupt password

[Matt Klein]

This may not be the proper forum for this question, but here goes...I have an old customer who is still using FileMaker Pro 4. I haven't done any work for them in several years and they have recently asked for some new features. The problem is that something has happened to the passwords in one of the files. I have only ever used two passwords as full access passwords and neither of them work.

There is an app on the internet for retrieving passwords from .fp3 through .fp5 files. I downloaded the trial version and ran it on this file. It actually comes back saying there are no passwords stored with the file...odd since when you open the file it asks for a password. So, I converted the file to .fp5 and this time it comes back with a single password starting with a "U" with a accent character over it. The trial version of the app only returns the first two characters.

So, it appears that some corruption has occured. I don't really think that paying for the full working version of that app is going to help based on the responses of the trial.

Any suggestions?

[Gar]

I have seen this before.

Prior programmer here wanted "better security" due to the password crackers available.

He created a password in ASCII on a text file, then copied/pasted the ASCII text into the password box. (Could your user have C/P'd a new password into the existing files?)

It worked. To the point that he was never able to access that file again! Nor would the copy/paste work in the password prompt for resetting passwords. Good news was that this was not the main file of our solution and was easily replaced by another "unsecure" file.

You may find a fix. If you do please post as I spent countless days trying to sort it out myself.