Escaping Chars

I need to get a password value from a form, store it in a database and then later be able to compare a login password to the one stored in the db. This works great unless the password contains the '\' char. magic_quotes_gpc is ON and magic_quotes_runtime is OFF. As a klude, I tried just removing slashes from the input password using stripslashes() before storing it in the db and then testing to see if stripslashes(val from db)=stripslashes(val from form) in the login test to see if they match. (the user shouldn't even know that slashes are being striped, so I have to strip them on each input). They still don't match if a slash is input for the original password storage, but I don't know why. However, instead of this work-around (that doesn't even work), what I'd really like to do is allow ANY character in the password, but take care of all the quoting and escaping along the way (both ways...). How is the best way to do that? Thanks, rob.walls@hill.af.mil