Hi All,

I've been running WinXP-Pro/SP2 with MySQL 5.0.15-nt for at least six
months. I'm running under an Administrator account on my own machine
at home and have sole access to it.

I've had K:\_Utilities\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\My.cnf set up for all
that time as:

[client]

host=localhost
port=3306
user=root
password=[snip]

Today, I was setting up Ruby-on-Rails stuff so I could change, in just
one line, the base-name for a suite of development/test/production
databases and then:

(1) generate a proper .yml file to tell a Rails app the database
names/attributes
(2) generate a set of drop/create/grant SQL statements for those
databases
(3) use a one-line command to direct MySQL to create the suite of
databases.

It all worked great except MySQL now refuses to grant access to root
using my password.
I didn't change nor forget my password ... its my same developer
password I've used for decades.
Rebooting Windows didn't improve the situation.

- Control Panel Services says MySQL is started.
- Task Manager Applications says MySQL Server 5.0 is running
- The vanilla command "mysql" (which used to work) reports:
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost'
(using password: YES)
- Ditto for the command "mysql -uroot -p" with my subsequently entered
password(which used to work)

The only thing unusual this time is that I fired up MySQL Front and
fumbled around with it (because I hardly ever use it). It didn't seem
to do anything flaky and hasn't ever caused any problem heretofore.

Is un/re-install of MySQL likely to get it working again. Is safe to
copy into a new installation some saved database directories from my
current configuration.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Richard