ok in the login script that you sent me iv desided i need to learn how to encrypt the data i would like to use md5 encryption. i have no clue what need to be added to it for everything to be read in right.

MD5 is not encryption, it's just a hash. What you need to do is simply to save md5($password) instead of $password in your database. Then when the user wants to log in, you compare md5($_GET["password"]) with the password hash stored in the database.

Here is a tiny utility to convert a string to MD5

would the same apply to sha1

Yes, absolutely. The only difference is that md5 is available from PHP 3 whereas sha1 is available from PHP 4.3.