Baffling "User accounts" oddities.

[Keygrip]

Well...baffling to me at least - but that doesn't take a lot of doing with compyooters.

Windows XP Pro.

Wife has her own desktop machine - she has the only account on it, under the name "June" ("Guest" account is turned off). She has full administrator rights through that account - despite not knowing how to use any of them.

When the machine boots up, it goes to a password/log in screen with the word "Administrator" in the account field....but it's greyed out - then an extra pop-up box says "Cannot log you into your account"- at which she clicks the red/white cross in the corner and is presented with a pretty "Welcome Screen" showing one icon and her account name.

When she clicks that she goes straight into her personal settings.

I was just in there, curing a "Solutioncentre.msi" problem, and notice she also gets (on boot up) a notification that Outlook wants to compress her messages to save disk space (though she has used a minor fraction of the 500Gb space). I seem to have no way of stopping this pop up appearing - but it, too, goes away at first click of red/white cross.

So - how many of you have thought of "User Account" settings? As it is just now, when she clicks to shutdown at the end of the day, she is presented with the three coloured boxes from Microsoft, "Log Off, Shutdown, Restart" - but if she changes the User Account setting to allow her to log straight in as default account, these three boxes change to a scruffy drop down selection menu.

Any of this make sense?

[Gertrude the Wombat]

Any of this make sense?
No. Windows 2000 still works fine.

[OK, so I do have some boxes running Win2k3 Server and XP, but

(a) the first thing I do with any XP box is turn off the teletubbies mode so that it looks like a grown-up computer

(b) the second thing I do is spot that most of my software won't run without administrator priviledges so I just give myself those, end of problem.]

[SyllogismCheck]

It's a quirk of XP. The user setup is flawed. If, as an allegedly prudent user would, you name the administrator account by a name other than the default 'Administrator', the whole log in/log out UI goes to the dogs, unless you give it the old skool 2K look (the 'scruffy' but practical drop downs) and rather to continue to use the flashy, but flexibility free, XP buttons.

Best solution is, restore the original administrator login and forget the personalised login option. Two ways to do this should work.

1,Go to the User Accounts application in the Control Panel. From the "Pick a task" list, click "Change the way users log on or off." Clear the "Use the Welcome screen" check box (this action automatically disables Fast User Switching as well) and click the Apply Options button. Then, log on to the system using the classic logon screen, and you'll be able to enter any account name you want to. When you open the User Accounts applet in the Control Panel, you'll see that the Administrator account is now visible. By logging into this, you should be able to delete the 'June' acct, which you couldn't do when logged in on it as you'd be attempting to delete what the OS would see as the only admin acct.

2, Erm, actually, I can't remember how it's done right now, but it's a registry change to force the admin acct to be shown as a login option even whilst using the XP style login screen. It's slicker than the above, not that that's too tricky, but if it sound like what you need, I'll try harder to remember and post accordingly.

Oh, BTW, don't worry about the prudence of logging in as administrator. If someone wishes to hack your machine, the difference between an account named 'June' or 'Administrator' won't make the difference. The latter keeps things simple for you however.

[mocoman]

Open Regedit and navigate to...

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList

Add the DWORD value ‘Administrator’ with a value of ‘1′

This should force XP to show Administrator in the user list.

...but I think that Keygrip is talking about something slightly different.

[KrazyKraut]

Hey Keygrip,

Hope all is well your end. Might be in your parts later this year and stop by to see you, schedule permitting.

If the suggestions posted earlier don't work, you could try logging on as 'June' (with administrator privileges) and from there create another admin-privileged user account with a different name, i.e. June1 or something else. Then move all the files from June's 'My documents', 'Favorites' etc. across into the new account by browsing c:\users\june etc. Second, verify it's all there by logging on to the June 1 account and browsing the respective folders. If it went okay, delete the June account and other accounts on that machine (which shouldn't be a problem, since only June uses it), and reset the options regarding display of the logon screen as described in the previous post. This might fix it.:)

Take care,

M