[Kaelon]

Thanks, Paul. I gave that a shot, but strangely, still no luck. Specifically, I used:

$username = htmlspecialchars_uni($username);
$password = htmlspecialchars_uni($password);

... and I still got invalid returns from the system. Then looking further, I also saw that the chat_auth.php code provided by Chris Duerr had already apparently done this analysis:

   # Fetch User Info from Database..
   $uid = 0;
   if ($userinfo = $db->query_first('SELECT userid, usergroupid, membergroupids, password, salt FROM ' . TABLE_PREFIX . 'user WHERE username = "' . addslashes(htmlspecialchars_uni($username)) . '"'))
   {
      # Invalid Password
    if (($userinfo['password'] != $password) && ($userinfo['password'] != md5(md5($password) . $userinfo['salt'])))    
          $auth = 0;    
    else
...