[raverbashing]

> but I was under the impression that salt just thwarted pre-computed hash tables?

Yes. Because if you had two users with the password 'dadada' they would hash to the same value

Now 1234:dadada hashes differently then 1326:dadada hence preventing the use of a prehashed table (you could go through all salts for common passwords, but it's usually a bit long as well)