The password fields being different sizes is a longstanding IE-specific problem, where it has different mappings of the 'size' attribute (max count in characters) to the default width of the actual input box for regular text inputs and password inputs.

This is likely due to either forcing a font, or differences in how it calculates the width based on average character sizes. (Since every "character" shown in the password box is a little dot thingy, they're all the same size, which is much narrower than many regular letters.)

Apparently this can be worked around by specifying explicit widths in the stylesheets.

(This is a totally trivial problem in that it has no actual negative effects, it's just a little annoying looking.)

The side-by-side issue is likely related to longstanding issues with the MediaWiki login/create account box itself *being floated*, which is confusing and weird, and it's not always obvious how to make sure the text either does, or doesn't float.

Not super high priority, but also not a new issue. The float on that should probably be removed all around for good measure, but may need minor fixups in various skins.

Going ahead and duping this to bug 18262 which covers the password field issue.

• This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 18262 ***