phantom users

Hi there. Sometimes when a user should be deleted (and is in fact gone from the WP User Page and wp_users table), the account hangs around somehow, and the credentials still work. And the old user’s email address can’t be used to create a new account.

I’ve dumped the database to text files and searched for the username/email and found references in a few tables: wp_comments, wp_usermeta, and wp_cleanup_optimizer_login_log.

I’m not worried about comments, and deleting the wp_usermeta record makes no difference. Which narrows it down to wp_cleanup_optimizer_login_log. On a side note, it has almost 800 thousand rows, which seems excessive (but I guess I don’t really care).

So wp_cleanup_optimizer_login_log has an obvious connection to logging in, which is where the problem is (old [deleted] users can still log in — new accounts w/ same credentials are prevented).

I’d like to know whether I can safely delete pretty much everything in this table without breaking something, or alternatively, whether I should be looking for something more specific. And also please let me know if I’m way off track (but what else could it be at this point?).

Thanks for your help. Talk soon.