Hide account from login screen but can be used in UAC

Posted by tvanover on Super User See other posts from Super User or by tvanover
Published on 2009-11-05T21:34:43Z Indexed on 2010/03/28 9:03 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 637

Filed under:
|
|
|

So I have a Windows 7 home machine with 2 user accounts. One is a standard user account and one is an administrator account. Now this is going to be put in the hands of a very low-tech user so I don't want them to be able to see the administrator account on logon, but they want to have a password to prevent someone else from using the machine.

My goal is that when the user turns on the computer, they are presented with their login. After logging in to their non-administrator account, if something needs to be installed then the administrator account can be used through UAC.

I have tried creating the reg key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList and adding a dword of the account name and set it to 0. It succeeded in hiding the account from th login screen. As well as hiding it from UAC. So it fails the second requirement, of being able to run things as administrator through UAC.

Also since I didn't set an administrator password (left it blank) it seems that I have completely locked myself out of the machine since runas doesn't accept blank passwords. So I also cannot undo it, and have quite effectively bricked the install, prompting an OS reinstall.

This is Windows 7 Home, so there is no Users management console.

© Super User or respective owner

Related posts about windows-7

Related posts about uac