Hi Artie123,
It sounds like you didn't restart Tomcat after changing the gpt.xml files. Any changes that you make to the Geoportal's configuration won't take effect until you restart the Tomcat server.
If that didn't work, reopen the gpt.xml file to see if your new password is still there. If your old password is there instead, the gpt.xml file might be set to Read Only or you might have some kind of permission issue with changing the file.
I hope that this helped.
Thanks,
Richard