If you receive this error message, the answer to your question is here. Don’t go anywhere else.
After wading through substantial non-sense, Pat Hayzlett points out the answer here.
The problem in a nut shell is that mySQL 4.1 changed their password hashing and now store the passwords of database users in 40 chars instead of 16 [...]

I use emacs as my preferred text editor. In general I prefer text files to more complicated or proprietary formats such as Word .doc files. Text is easy to use. Text files are small. Text can be processed with standard tools such as grep, diff, sed and awk.
In that light emacs is a somewhat heavy [...]

On my home Linux Box (Whitebox Enterprise 3.0) I use a number of different users for various purposes. I tend to create and delete them fairly often.
I suddenly started seeing a warning when creating or deleting a user:

[root@server root]# adduser newuser
configuration error - unknown item ‘PASS_MAX_AGE’ (notify administrator)
[root@server root]# userdel newuser
configuration error - unknown item [...]