cheeto,
Hm. It's possible the scurity patch also affected the configuration of the network packets.
For example, older versions of Novell used to have a setting called Receive Buffer Packet Size (RBPS). This would default to 1.5 KB and would cause problems for Paradox tables because most tables used at least 4KB table buffers. Thus, you'd need three packets to transfer one table buffer.
As you can imagine, this increased packet traffic dramatically. It didn't cause an immediate problem, but things because iffy when there were many users (600) in the system at the same time. After a lot fo experimentation and research, we stumbled over the RBPS setting and increased it to 4.5KB.
As soon as we did that, all the instabilities vanished, network traffic reduced dramatically, and everyone was happy.
As you probably know, table passwords encrypt tables. thus, changing the password is a fairly serious operation, as the entire table will need to be transferred to the client and then resubmitted back to the server.
So, if anything has modified the settings controlling traffic, that would have an impact.
Yes, it's a bit of a stretch, but it's the only thing I can think of at this point.
Hope this helps...
-- Lance