When I turn on the computer it stops at the Welcome screen and has one name, Administrator. I click on it (no password needed) and the computer starts normally. Then I decided I wanted to bypass the Welcome screen and instead boot right into Windows XP Pro. So I did control userpasswords2, unchecked “users must enter a username and password”, clicked the “Advanced” tab and made sure “requires user to press cntrl+alt+del” was unchecked, then went to “User Accounts” and unchecked “Use the Welcome screen” and clicked “Apply Options”.

Then when I rebooted the computer it stopped at the welcome screen again (the very thing I was trying to bypass) and asked for the Administrator password!!! When I clicked on the icon like before it kept telling me the password was wrong when there never was a password before? I don’t get it?? I didn’t need a password before so why do I need one now?? I’ve done this on many computers before and never had this happen.
Fortunately for me this was a spare computer of mine (and not someone else’s) so I could reload Windows from a backup I had without having someone really pissed at me! Where did I go wrong in this process?

this behaviour normally happens after SP3 is installed.....

ACSS - SME
General Geek

Wow - not to my knowledge it doesn't. Link or reference?

Well I am running SP3 but like I said, I've never had this happen before on any SP3 machine?

I'm wondering if it's because you tried to do that with the "administrator" user and not another user. Why I don't know.

It could be the ASPNET local user account, which can be deleted, or the latest .NET 1.1 service pack would fix that as well.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;...

Umm... It wasn't accidental/spontaneous. He intentionally set the options for auto login.

Are you on a domain?

Perhaps I was thinking .net - been a while since installing XP workstations. but certainly after installing a number of XP updates, the machine would always boot to the welcome screen rather than the desktop when a single user with no password was created initially.

ACSS - SME
General Geek

No, I'm not on a domain. I'm going to experiment with this a little more (on a test machine of course)! Thanks guys.