Jenny had a post about how WordPress caching seems to mess everything up, at least in WP v2.0.2. Disabling the cache fixed a very serious error that was bringing the site down.

As it turns out, I was having a heck of a time with user management on a fresh WordPress install. When I initially logged in as Administrator, I immediately changed the default password, but then the new password wouldn’t work. After several attempts, it finally accepted the new password. Later, I tried making other changes to the profile, and they just wouldn’t take. But then later, some of the changes would start showing up. Very odd and perplexing.

Well, caching issues usually do cause very odd behavior. Sure enough, I disabled the caching, and everything was fine. And to further verify that this is a valid solution, if you look inside the ~/wp-content/cache directory, there are two user-oriented cache subdirectories: “users” and “userlogins”. WordPress v2.0.2 apparently doesn’t handle the caching very well when updating user information.