Sicloan, seeing as how I'm checking back
I think you may have md5decrypt confused with base64_decode. As far as I know, md5 cannot be decoded, and searching on the PHP website (because as far as my memory served the function was non existent) and I was right! But yes I do agree that the function is alot safer, and pretty ingenious too.
VB does something similar, except they assign a random 3 bit character string (they call a SALT) to every registered user and then heres how they do it:
PHP Code:
md5( md5( $password ) . $salt );
Where what they do is first encrypt the password (plain text, unencrypted) and then add that encrypted text with the salt, and encrypt that all together. It might be alot easier to understand for novice programmers.