The bigger issue is that the installer .iso images for Linux Mint were backdoored this weekend: <a href="http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2994" rel="nofollow">http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2994</a>
There is no reason to store an encrypted password outside of proxying to another system. Where was the key to the stored password? This forum looks poorly designed from a security perspective.