My password protection at startup recently stopped working.

I don't have any data that really needs the protection, but I like knowing that if my Ax is off for 30 minutes, someone can't just pick it up and start going through it. After checking if something was running in the background (there wasn't), I did a soft reset and that seems to have fixed the problem.
The point to all this is how can you be expected to trust the password option to keep people, when it may just stop functioning? :soap: