restful_authentication falling tests, allowing blank passwords

All, I'm a bit of a journeyman when it comes to RoR, and I've been having one issue setting up restful_authentication that's making me batty. I got most of my direction from the README and Ryan Bates' railscast[1], but every time I set up an authentication system with rails 2.0.2, users are failing one of their unit tests:

    1) Failure:     test_should_require_password(UserTest)         [test/unit/user_test.rb:31:in `test_should_require_password'          /Applications/Locomotive2/Bundles/ rmagickRailsDec2007_i386.locobundle/framework/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ activesupport-2.0.2/lib/active_support/core_ext/test/unit/ assertions.rb:39:in `assert_difference'          /Applications/Locomotive2/Bundles/ rmagickRailsDec2007_i386.locobundle/framework/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ activesupport-2.0.2/lib/active_support/core_ext/test/unit/ assertions.rb:58:in `assert_no_difference'          test/unit/user_test.rb:29:in `test_should_require_password']:     <nil> is not true.

This basically allows a you to create a new user with a blank password. I threw some logger statements into my model, and this is what I'm seeing when the test runs:

    === called password_required?     crypted: 'NULL'     crypted blank: false     password:     password blank: true     password nil: true     result: false

A bit of an update... changing `password_required?` to

    def password_required?       crypted_password.blank? || crypted_password == "'NULL'" || ! password.blank?     end

Allows all restful_authentication tests to pass, even the functional tests. This still seems a bit odd. Anyone have any thoughts?