phpMyAdmin problem

[jamieh]

When I try to access phpMyAdmin I encounter the following error -

MySQL said: Documentation
#1045 - Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)
phpMyAdmin tried to connect to the MySQL server, and the server rejected the connection. You should check the host, username and password in your configuration and make sure that they correspond to the information given by the administrator of the MySQL server.

phpMyAdmin was working fine before but I ran the XAMPP security command through terminal and it told me that a password had been set for the MySql user 'root' when there was no password set. After this phpMyAdmin was working fine so I went into the database 'mysql' in phpMyAdmin and changed the password using the following command:

UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('root') WHERE User='root';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

After I did this, phpMyAdmin became inaccessible. I am using XAMPP Mac OS X 1.7.3 using Mac OSX 10.5.8.