For some reason DotNetPark, our ISP recently moved my DNN (4.5) website to a different server.   

In the process of moving our site, they “broke” the password encryption process.  At first, I noticed that I was unable to log in with any user or password. 

The only way to log in was to change web.config's password setting from "encrypted" to "clear"  But that's just a band-aid & we are really kind of stuck here b/c we are only able to use the encrypted versions of the passwords in clear text format.   These are very long & unweildy strings of characters.  

To make matters worse, passwords cannot be changed.  Both the user's "change my password" & the admin's (or host's) change password functions result in an error. 

I did notice that two other keys had been changed in the web.config file: 

machineKey validationKey 

decryptionKey

and the following was added:  <add key="InstallationDate" value="6/30/2008" />

I suspect that someone attempted to reinstall DNN "over" the existing files and the machine keys got crossed. 

Does anyone have any clue about what can be done or where we should start? 

dude, you're a genius -- that's definitely progress!  I am now able to change passwords for users & users can change their own. 

I'm not sure where to go from here though b/c passwords are still saved in clear text.  I checked the asp_Membership table and I can read my test user's password.  All users are set to "0" in the Passwordformat field.  I tried changing the web.config key "Passwordformat" to "Encrypted", but it doesn't seem to make a difference. 

How can I get back to truly using encrypted passwords?