The reason was bascially that the pure link to the password page is "cleaner" and doesn't require the colorbox scripts being loaded on every page. That it does if you use it for the login form overriding the colorbox plugin settings (which I forgot earlier).
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just out of curiosity i saw that the older version sidebar.php, the default setting was 2. Any special reason for setting it to 0 by default in 1.4.7?