Firefox Password Fail

What happened with Firefox remembering passwords? Around the middle of July I suddenly noticed Firefox wasn't remembering passwords anymore. It still had them all in the saved passwords list (I think -- it doesn't anymore), and I still had it set to remember them, but it wouldn't auto-fill forms anymore and it didn't offer to remember new passwords. Oddly, this happened to both my home and work machines. My work machine runs Windows XP and Firefox 3, while my home machine runs Gentoo and Firefox 2, so it's fairly odd that both broke at the same time. I finally got around to searching for a fix today, and found a bunch of posts with the same problem:

• http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=762045


• http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=nl&forumId=1&comments_parentId=108743


• http://wccftech.com/forum/my-firefox-doesnt-remember-passwords-anymore-19358.html


• http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080524124947AADpbyu

All these people posted right around the same time, the middle of July. It seems Firefox simultaneously broke for a whole bunch of different people, and as far as I can tell nobody knows why; I'm not even sure if people have noticed the connection or not. The fix seems to be deleting the password cache so it can start over, but I haven't heard any explanation for what actually happened