Problems using psql--Fatal password authentication failed

Thanks to Tim, Robert, et. al. for helping with the import csv problem.  Using your suggestions, I believe I was able to rectify that particular issue.

However, now I am having the problem of using the proper DATE and TIME syntax.  I have looked in the Postgres manual, and it gives a whole long list of different date and time functions, but I am not sure which one I should use and how to integrate it into a "create table as" command.

the csv file was created in MS Excel (yes I use Windows).  

At the moment, the easy work-around is to simply define each column as "text".  The csv imported perfectly doing it this way,  however, I want to use the proper syntax and formatting whenever possible:

convert date as text (mm/dd/yyyy) to  yyyy-mm-dd

convert time as text (hh:mm) to time without timezone  hh:mm:ss

So, my question is, what do I need to do to my query language to ensure that posgresql processes the query successfully using the specified formats?  I'm using v. 8.3 of PostgreSQL.

thanks in advance,

Kindra