Greetings,
It appears that if you do the following:
Start the server with pg_hba.conf saying to use 'ident'
Change pg_hba.conf to use 'md5'
Send HUP signal to server
Log in to server (with password), create a database
It seems to revert to using 'ident' again, at least for that database
and possibly overall. Havn't had a chance to play with it yet but it
seems pretty straight-forward to repeat.
Stephen