A friend of mine has forgotten his password to log into Windows XP Home. Can this be by-passed?

If it's anything like other NT versions, if it's the only administrator password for that machine, it's pretty sticky. I think it involves installing a parallel version of Windows onto another hard disk (ick).

If you have another admin account on the machine, just log in as that one and change the password for that user.

Have you tried searching the KB at support.microsoft.com ?

Try http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

My dad had this issue on his machine. For some reason, it just started asking him to change his password and gave him a deadline to do so. He was puzzled because he had never entered a password to his account. The deadline came and he was totally locked out. He kept putting in the password he uses most often, and it would not let him in. I think it's probably because XP was confused when he didn't enter an initial password.

I was able to log in using the administrator account and the normal password, and I changed his account to never ask for a password and, more importantly, to never change the password. You may want to do this too, Phil, if you ever get back in.

My dad had this issue on his machine. For some reason, it just started asking him to change his password and gave him a deadline to do so. He was puzzled because he had never entered a password to his account. The deadline came and he was totally locked out. He kept putting in the password he uses most often, and it would not let him in. I think it's probably because XP was confused when he didn't enter an initial password.

My XP machine asked me for the same information even though I had not entered a password. All I did was hit ok without entering a new one and it told me that my new password was stored. You can bypass it this way. Just dont enter a password if you didn't previously have one.

Thanks... I'll give this a try later. Nothing to lose!

I use this utility all the time. It works great.

Yep, this disk works very well. And I used to drink beer with the author every thurdsday for years ;-)

Marius (Escort Cab + 2CV)

It worked like a charm. Thanks!