I don't think you're OT at all. That's exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for. An out-of-the-box user authentication system.

For this particular project I don't expect to be using a database at all. The amount of information I intend to store is only a few lines per user. So having this stored in a simple text file should be perfectly sufficient.

The brief bit I did with Catalyst seems like it's the type of thing I want. But getting it installed on my webhost... eesh.