Securing sections of web sites (htaccess, etc.)

Miscellaneous Forums/General Discussion/Securing sections of web sites (htaccess, etc.)

I'm having trouble password protecting the administration section for a web site :(

For some reason, my attempts at htaccess / htpasswd are not working!
I am getting the login window asking me for a username / password, but it does not seem to be reading my .htpasswd file; typing the correct password does not let me enter! (The login window just pops up again).

First off here is the .htaccess file. Seems to be in working order...
AuthUserFile /home/mysite/.htpasswd
AuthName "admin"
AuthType Basic
require valid-user

And here is that .htpasswd file
dhs:myencryptedpassword


If any errors jump out at you, please let me know!

So I gave up on the whole htpasswd end of things and went with PHP sessions instead.
However, it is horrible to work with; I have to go through every single file which I want protected and add a little bit of code to the top. If I don't, that page is open for anyone to mess with. Big problem, since there are /a lot/ of files, and a good chance that some of them will be later replaced by others. (Which do not have the added check).

So, both solutions are bad.
-Is there perhaps a way to tell the server to add a bit to the top of every file within a directory (probably via .htaccess), without me manually making any changes to the actual files?

-Also, a bit less importantly, do you know of a PHP-powered secure login system? I've seen a few, but they tend to be really 'fancy', and they also generally require a MySQL database. (I would be very happy with one that interfaced directly with the web server's htaccess authentication stuff instead of using a bloody database to hold about 3 user accounts). All it really needs is changing passwords / adding users, which I expect exists in just about any such account system.