in sfGuardPlugin/config/schema.xml line 39:
<column name="algorithm" type="VARCHAR" size="128" required="true" default="\asha1\a" />
This makes (on mySQL 5.0.30 with myISAM tables, at least) the default algorithm \asha1\a, which fails when creating a user at the database level. Using the sfGuardUser module (and lib/model/sfGuardUser.php::setPassword()) both set the algorithm to sha1 by default, so this problem does not occur when using the supplied backend (hence I've classified it 'minor'), but it affected us when we were generating our own users from outside the app.
