Okay, we've been staring at this thing for two days, now, and we're no closer to cracking the mystery; indeed, if anything, dwelling on it has only raised more questions. Ugly questions. Questions like, "why the letter 'U'?" And "why is only the capital one a problem?" And of course the biggie, "just when exactly did Apple start paying Microsoft to come up with utterly baffling and seemingly insane bugs for its products?"

At first we thought it, like the evil monkey that lives in our closet, was just the fevered hallucination of a sleep-deprived mind, but then faithful viewer EelBait insisted that he saw it, too, and other viewers followed: an official support document from Apple's own servers confirming that you can't use a capital "U" in your Open Firmware password, or else said password "will not be recognized during the startup process." It's real. This is a genuine, honest-to-weirdness bug involving, of all things, a restriction on using a specific letter of the alphabet-- uppercase only, of course. Duh.

So now we're starting to wonder about that "hallucinational" monkey, too. This could be bad. (Anyone seen Outbreak?)

You know about Open Firmware passwords, right? If you're the paranoid type and you think evil monkeys are creeping out of your closet in the middle of the night to boot your Mac and mess with all your files (replacing the body of your résumé with an excerpt from Monkey Hamlet, for instance), you can actually set a password which your Mac will require before it tries to boot a disk other than your designated startup volume-- so people (or simians) can't just boot off a CD-ROM or external hard drive and then mount your hard disk and wreak havoc. It's a nice feature if you're the crates-of-Beefaroni-in-the-bomb-shelter type-- as long as you don't insist on using a password with a capital "U" in it.

So why no "U"? Clipboard-wielding denizens of the AtAT laboratory have as yet been unable to find any technical reason for the restriction, which leads us to believe that it's somehow intentional. So far the most plausible explanation we've come up with is that someone at Apple really doesn't want people using the titles of Prince songs as their passwords. Something to ponder over the weekend while you're fending off the monkeys.