historical reasons, i think.....
as far as I know, user-names are case-insensitive, at least to some degree, at least they used to be....
way back when.....
some terminals (dumb terminals, not pc's running a terminal emulation program) could not do lowercase letters at all so provision was made for people who used them
i haven't tried this in ages but - if you login to a unix system, as the user 'mike', say - but using all uppercase letters like this 'MIKE'; the system will (well they used to anyway) assume you're on a *particularly* dumb terminal and go into change-everything-you-type-into-lower-case mode, so that uppercase only terminals could login and do some work
a *truly* useless piece of information that
Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.