[apologies if this is a repost] Full n00b mode here folks. For completeness, I wanted to post a followup to my problem. Maybe this will help someone else. I extended the login generators user model and added fields to the users table. I made a view following the pattern in the Agile book that would allow them to change their own contact info (phone, email etc) but I was having trouble calling update_attributes on that record. My original (ie "wrong") hypothesis was that maybe update_attributes worked only when updating a full record. What actually was happening was that the original model from the login generator contained a rule to validate the password. Since my new view omitted the password field, the validation was failing. I get a little bit smarter every day. Gary