Thanks, I missed the die in the trace. Very odd all the checks I've been doing didn't pick that up either. I'll need to figure out why error() is being called. More specifically it's setting $mode to die I believe. That shouldn't be happening.

I do want the literal '^-', it's the first two characters in the error messages. It's the real password, but it's also the default and it's in a lab, unaccessible from the internet.