The second caused some unusual light activity, but did not fix my problem.

I ended up exchanging it for another. One thing I noticed when I got the new one is the way it was packed. Evidently the first one was already returned once.

I think while playing around with the new one, I may have found the problem with the first. I went to do a firmware patch on the new one, and the same thing happened. When I backed off to a previous patch, it recognized the password again.

Lesson of the day: Beware of firmware release 2.56B19a