From the volume and tone of the e-mail, a lot of you agreed with my rant about passwords, that we all have too many to manage. What I didn't expect was the number of suggestions readers offered for dealing with multiple logins. In addition to the programs I tried — RoboForm and Password Safe — several readers recommended a free, no-frills password manager called KeePass.

Like Password Safe, this is an open-source project, which means it's developed and tested by a community of programmers and well-tested by hackers.KeePass also makes life easy for those who work on several computers. The program will run from a USB thumb drive, so you can use it on your home, work or any other PC without storing your passwords on a foreign drive.Just remember that if you lose the thumb drive, you're toast unless you have the passwords permanently recorded somewhere else.

Web developer David Jourard, proprietor of BytesInteractive.com, has an interesting utility for traditionalists — a Web page that generates a strong, random password of any length, such as this 10-character brain twister: KiP8FS2V6t (visit www.goodpassword.com).Passwords like these protect against break-ins because they're hard to guess. Made up of random characters and numbers, they're less vulnerable to cracking programs.The problem with random passwords, of course, is that no one can remember them, which is why people feel compelled to write this stuff down in the first place.

Goodpassword.com attacks this conundrum with another utility — a Web page that generates a "Leet" password from the phrase of your choice.If you haven't heard of Leet (from the word "elite"), it's a linguistic trick played by Web wizards and teenage geeks of all ages. They substitute look-alike or sound-alike characters for the real characters in a word or phrase.

The number "4" can substitute for "A" and so on. Your kids probably use these tricks when they send text messages.

Goodpassword.com builds your "easy" password by taking the first letter of each word in your phrase and substituting a Leet equivalent, if there is one. Among the more prosaic suggestions, several readers keep all their passwords in a Microsoft Word document that's encrypted and protected with its password — a utility that's built into the program.

To do this (at least in my version of Word), create a document containing your passwords, click on File/Save As, then choose Options and type a password in the box that pops up. Next time you try to open the document, it will ask for your password. Once again, this will only be secure if you use a password that isn't easy to guess. And if you forget your master password, say sayonara to the rest.

Taking a slightly different tack, a colleague at The Columbian in Vancouver, Wash., says he uses an unencrypted Word file to record his passwords. But instead of writing the exact password down, he uses written hints to remind him without leaving a trail for snoops. For example, the user name could be, "Frank's dog" and the password could be "Becky's cat." Once again, this assumes that no one but you knows the identity of Frank and Becky's pets.

A third reader offers this variant: "My 'code' is pretty simple. Let's say my master password is 'jones,' but on some sites it becomes 'jones25' or '52jones or `jonesbones' or whatever. On my list of passwords, I replace 'jones' with the word 'usual.' I know what it means but no one else does."

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