[Happy Monkey]

It will happen.

I withdrew my predictions from 8 and 13 already.

I don't think you've tested whether the things I've said were supposed to happen in 15, 19, and 25 are happening. They wouldn't affect what you see in your normal execution, just what is happening behind the scenes. As I said, the while loop is correcting for the strange behavior of the functions, and it seems to me that all of the overwhelming evidence you have presented includes the while loop.

If you test the functions alone, not in a while loop, you can see the side effects:

main()
{
cin.getline(pw)
if (a(pw))
cout << "a returned true, pw is now " << pw << endl;
else
cout << "a returned false, pw is now " << pw << endl;
}

If you enter a bad password, it will ask for another. If you enter another one, it will return false, even if the second one was good.