album password problem

I am really sorry about this. I've been working on this for a several hours, and I have read most of the posts on this in the forum, but I am missing something (probably obvious). My gallery (3.0.2) root has four albums, two of which are being controlled by group assignments. A third is called "public" and has no security assigned except "everyone." The fourth is called "private" and I want to use it to hold albums that are passworded. The only security on "private" is "everyone." I created an album (call it xxx) in private and gave it a permission of "everyone." So all albums in the tree have one permission assigned to read access for everyone. I went into xxx as admin and assigned a password (version 3) but did not enter the password using the "unlock albums" tab. When I log out, the album and its contents are visible. Restart browser and make sure password is not set and have the same problem.

That was in Chrome. I went into Firefox 8, and did not log in. The albums private and xxx were both visible and the contents of xxx were visible. Same with IE9.

"Do not require passwords" is not checked.

I tried many permutations of logging in and out, and creating and passwording xxx with different sequences, and was not able to figure out what I'm doing wrong.

Can someone please help me. I am working against a deadline and am almost out of time.

Thanks much in advance!
Rick.