You do come up with the most unique issues, Patti. So unique, in fact, that neither I nor the SMF developers can quite figure out what's going on. Neither they nor I have ever seen asterisks appear in the password field - there's nothing in the SMF scripts to even code for that.
I suspect the issue may be somehow connected to your browser. When you've logged in here, has your browser ever asked you if you want to save your password info? If so, and if you have saved it, try clearing something like your "Form & Search History" or "Active Logins" in Firefox, or "Form data" or "Passwords" in IE. That might help. Or it might not...
Good luck!