I need an XP expert!

[RayB]

Someone help me out here... I'm a fairly advanced PC user, but I'm stumped:

Used to be I had ONE user on this system, (carried over from Win 98). The PC would boot straight into Win XP Pro under that user. No log-in screen, no Welcome screen, nothing.

A few weeks back something happened that changed the way my PC boots.

Now, it keeps wanting to boot straight into the user "Administrator". Even if I enable the "Welcome screen", it would boot to the Administrator and I would have to "log off" in order to access my normal user (which btw, is also under Admin user group)

With some fiddling, the best I've gotten to is to disable the Administrator account, so now when it tries to boot as that user, an error prompt appears saying the account has been disabled. I then alt-tab and I have the Welcome screen with my normal user account available to click on and log in.

I would really like the computer to default to my old user account like it used to! I don't know what caused this, but two possible things are:

1. I installed something that may have installed .NET framework. Not sure how this relates.

2. My system had been acting weird and not shutting down so I had brought up the Users panel and clicked "disconnect". I THINK this is what started all this...

Any ideas? And please, I've tried all the obvious things like:

Disable the Welcome screen
Delete the Administrator account (not permitted to do this!).

All I need to do is specify what user it should default to. But how?

[Extreme8]

This is the method I use on my MAME cab.


You can configure Windows XP to automate the logon process if your computer is not part of a domain.

1.Click Start, click Run, and type control userpasswords2.

2.Clear the "Users must enter a username and password to use this computer" check box.

3.Click Apply.

4.Enter the user name and password you wish to automatically log on with, and then click OK.

5.Click OK again and you're all done.

[RayB]

Thank you Extreme8! That did the trick.

[shorthair]

Oh. I was gonna say that same thing happened with me when I installed .net 1.0 - but it went away with 2.0 . Many things, including recent graphics cards, require 2.0, so not sure there's any getting around it.

[boykster]

I think installing SP2 (or was it SP1) resets a bunch of the login stuff too....a bit annoying IMHO.

I just updated 2 machines to vista, so I'm welcoming a whole bunch of new annoyances