How can i authenticate a user without using Drupal functions? I need to authenticate a D7 user from a php page from outside a Drupal session. In D6 i could have used the md5() function, now i've seen that this is not possible due to changes to D7 authentication. How can i do it without using Drupal functions?
If you look in the includes/password.inc file in your drupal 7 installation, you can see how drupal 7 hashes up the password and then code that up separately or just include that file in your other script.  A quick tutorial on this can also be found here.