[Professional Engineer]

It's also VERY STOOPID. You get everyone writing down a list of passwords, that get reused every 6 to 9 changes, just so they can remember them. DUMB

[Overtaxed]

Hehehe....and then we have the deal where you have to log on to the network to run the mass spec. So right now we're always logged on into a "real" person's account. Hmmmm....what kind of mischief can I do?

[JenB]

The client site where I work three days a week makes us change passwords every 90 days, and it has to be at least eight characters long. I rarely shut the computer off there, so it might be hard to remember... I'll tell you, the temptation to just use "newpass1", "newpass2", "newpass3" is really hard to fight.

[Ramius]

You're very right about that. Too many companies think it improves security to require complex and long passwords and frequent changes without duplicates. All it really does is make people write their password down, and most of them do it by putting a sticky-note up under the keyboard.