Okay, for those of you who may have read this earlier, I've done a little research and completely revamped my question. I've been having a problem where my form requests get blackholed by the Security component, although everything works fine when the Security component is disabled. I've traced it down to a single line in a form:

<?php echo $form->create('Audition');?>
    <fieldset>
        <legend><?php __('Edit Audition');?></legend>
    <?php
        echo $form->input('ensemble');
        echo $form->input('position');
        echo $form->input('aud_date');
        // The following line works fine...
       echo $form->input('owner');  
       // ...but the following line blackholes when Security included
        // and the form is submitted:
        // echo $form->input('owner', array('disabled'=>'disabled');
    ?>
    </fieldset>
<?php echo $form->end('Submit');?>

(I've commented out the offending line for clarity) I think I'm following the rules by using the form helper; as far as I can tell, this is a bug in the Security component, but I'm too much of a CakePHP n00b to know for sure. I'd love to get some feedback, and if it's a real bug, I'll submit it to the CakePHP team. I'd also love to know if I'm just being dumb and missing something obvious here.