buffer problem having a mind of its own

hello again I was writing and rewriting my user function for my chat server trying to crush this bug but its beyond me whats going on. basically I have it so if a new user comes on, we know that if they type "new" at the prompt so it goes to the newuser function, asks for a username, accepts that alright, but when I ask for a password(echoed or not), even if i ask for anything else, just the second input of the function, it skips right threw that, prompts for it but apparently the buffer still has a \n in it so it is assuming that is the password and going right onto the 3rd signup prompt, i could stick with the default password being a random number and avoiding this whole problem, but i actually don't, the buffer is still full of whatever, and would ask the 3rd prompt but just drop right threw, I turned on implicit_flush in php.ini, just as a second measure, I call ob_implicit_flush() after reading from the socket each time, but the '\n' or whatever mysterious character, still seems to be there, also, I know too because before i started working on redoing the logon function, i would log on and i would automatically have a character sent but i didn't type anything so something is really screwy or am I just not clearing the buffers the right way? oh yes, as you may have assumed from what I wrote, or may not have, after the password or otherwise 2nd prompt, things work as expected with the other prompts, if this helps, I am using php 4.3.10 in command line interface