Nice try, but you got several key facts wrong. I don't discuss the technical details of my server to avoid giving hackers any leverage.

This belongs in the Journal of Irreproducible Results--it's never happened to me, and there's no rational explanation for it. The public areas of the site aren't password-protected, by definition, so it's hard to see a cause-and-effect relationship. Irreproducible problem reports are a classic tech-support nightmare. There's nothing I can do without a detailed description of the problem: Your computer & OS & browser, at a minimum; plus information about your ISP, including whether they're using any sort of proxy, firewall, or caching server that might be injecting its own authentication requests into the data stream.

General advice for everybody: Any time you're asked for a username and password in a situation in which you don't expect it, don't supply anything. Bogus authentication is literally the oldest trick in the hacker's book--they were doing it on the old timeshare systems in the '60s, tricking people into supplying their account info which went straight to the hacker.

Most public Internet names resolve to a lower-level machine (host) name, like "pluto". For bonus points, can you guess which host supports MarsGlobalSurveyor.com and MarsCentral.com? (Hint: It ain't "goofy" or "mickey".)

Would you like a Web site on "uranus"?

--Robert Shepherd