2009/5/4 nev young pasiphae1953@yahoo.co.uk:
I have no idea haw passwords are encrypted on windows machines but I would not be surprised if they still get processed left to right.
Even old Unix DES was not that dumb. These days the password is stored as a pretty strong hash where a one bit change in the input causes the output to be completely different. The addition of a salt (DES used 2 extra random characters) reduces the risk of two people with the same password having the same hash.
In Windows the hashes are stored in the registry while most unixes use /etc/shadow which can only be read by root. Windows NT4 hashes are weaker to guessing, and recent versions of Windows still generate that hash to maintain backwards compatibility with NT4 servers. At least SMB/Samba passwords are no longer sent in clear text!
Tim.