Vidalia's password prompt is often unhelpful; generates support requests
I'd say that at least 40% of the support requests we get for Vidalia are from people who have encountered the controller password prompt, and are asking themselves "What's this about a password?" And then we refer them to https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#VidaliaPassword
It would be good if Vidalia were better able to detect the cases that put it into this state, and tell the user what's really going on. It would also be good if Vidalia could try to recover from this state whenever it can. When Vidalia can neither explain what went wrong nor fix it, it should at the very least give the user more guidance about what might have happened and what they should do, so that they can sort it out themselves without searching for the FAQ.
Apologies if this is a duplicate; I scanned the open vidalia bugs and didn't find it mentioned.