I have done what you said and I still cannot
modify any records. I am probably missing
a piece of the pie.

Let's say we have a very simple database
with two fields "user_id" and "name"
and it looks like
__________
1,dave
2,john
__________

I put them in default.db just like this
with delimeter ","

If I set
$auth_user_field = 0;

then if I modify under userid for "1" dave should come up. But it does not. As long as I set $auth_view_own = 0; then I can search under userid =1 and it does come up. Why?

Does the userid assigned in default.pass by the crypt function have to be the same as the userid in my database?