Action fails silently - breakpoint doesn't hit

What are the general techniques to use when rails fails without any
feedback?
One action in a controller works but another fails silently.

I have a simple usercontroller for registration with scaffold generated
code.
The only change I made is to the view, which was to add a second
password field for
confirmation. I have a db table called users with all the fields
except ofcourse the extra password field. This field has a different
name
so it does not get into the user hash. The ‘user/new’ action works fine
and displays the form. The form action is correctly set (in the
generated html) to user/create. When I submit the form nothing happens.
I get a blank page in the browser. I added a breakpoint as the first
statement in the create action. The breakpoint in the create action does
not hit. When I put a breakpoint in the user/new action it works
correctly.

Webrick does report that /user/create was called.

127.0.0.1 - - [29/Dec/2005:15:52:13 EST] “POST /user/create HTTP/1.1”
500 0
http://localhost:3000/user/new → /user/create

There is nothing in the server log or the development log.
logger.warn or the breakpoint don’t do anything because it appears
that execution
does not reach the action.
Can some one please help me figure out where to look for this problem?

Thanks,

bakki kudva