Logged In: YES 
user_id=118537

All I know is that authentication failed for me until I made the change. 
I checked back with the implementation I used under 0.6.2 and it had 
the same form for the call to crypt. My recollection is very hazy, but I 
seem to recall that it has to do with our NIS passwd map using MD5 
hashes or some-such, and crypt needing to look at the first few 
characters to decide what encryption algorithm is being used.

FWIW, here's an example from our NIS passwd map:

smb:$1$G03.BGF1$TIV.UDbDdTTumMsQoc6hg/:833:1001:Steve 
Byan:/home/smb:/bin/bash

Here's the pertinent part from the crypt man page on my SuSE SLES9 
system that's running my roundup instances:

GNU EXTENSION
       The glibc2 version of  this  function  has  the  following
       additional features.  If salt is a character string start­
       ing with the three characters "$1$" followed  by  at  most
       eight  characters,  and optionally terminated by "$", then
       instead of using the DES machine, the glibc crypt function
       uses  an  MD5-based algorithm, and outputs up to 34 bytes,
       namely "$1$<string>$", where "<string>" stands for the  up
       to  8  characters following "$1$" in the salt, followed by
       22 bytes chosen from the set  [a–zA–Z0–9./].   The  entire
       key  is  significant  here  (instead  of  only the first 8
       bytes).

       Programs using this function must be linked with  -lcrypt.


So in my case, I need to pass crypt at least 5 characters.