After hours of working on this I have made little progress. I am unable to connect to MySQL as the root user. I couldn't even login to mysql to find out why. I finally got it restarted with the --skip-grant-tables switch and was able to login and found out that I don't have a root mysql user setup, but I do have an admin user. So I logged in as admin and created a root user. But I still cannot login as the root user and I know the password is correct because the encrypted form that it lists in the table is the same as the admin password. When I try to login I get:

shell# mysql -uroot -p
Enter password:
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Not sure what to do now, but if admin can do all the things that root can, then I really don't care.

Thanks in advance.

An admin user? This box isn't running Plesk by chance, is it? If so, the admin user is the root user. Just log in with

mysql -uadmin -p

and the password for admin. If this is a Plesk box, then I would simply delete the root user you created and use admin. If not, and you still want a root user, then you have to grant the user "root" access from localhost before you can log in from localhost as root.

I did have Plesk on there for a day, but I thought I took care of everything that plesk did to it. How would I grant the "root" user access from localhost then?