Can't Connect Locally (3 replies)

I installed CentOS 5.3 on a brand new virtual machine running on VMWare ESXi. I then installed MySQL 5.0.77 using yum. The only changes I've made from the out-of-box install is to grant root the ability to log in remotely, and I set up two databases and created two user accounts, one for each database.

When I try to connect locally, I can connect to either database as root, and I can connect to one of the databases using that database's user account, but I cannot connect to the other database using its user account. The connection is refused with the standard "Access is denied for user 'user'@'localhost' (using password: YES)" message.

However, when I try to connect remotely, I can connect to either database as root, and I can connect to either database using the user account created for that database.

I cannot figure out what's going on here. Can anyone suggest any ideas of what could be wrong, or what I should look at to figure out what's wrong?

Some of the things I've encountered while googling for answers:
1) make sure "localhost" is first in the list for "127.0.0.1" in the hosts file -- I tried this and it did nothing
2) make sure the mysql.sock file exists -- yup, it's there in "/var/lib/mysql", and it's configured in "my.cnf"
3) remove "old_passwords" configuration from my.cnf -- this did nothing