Okay. You've pretty much confirmed my suspicions. It is almost certainly true
that you have NOT done anything to the Administrator account. You have still
not told me what version of Vista you are running, but your observation that
there is no Local users and groups in the Computer Management console seems
to indicate that you have one of the versions of Vista that is devoid of a
policy editor. (I'm not familiar with these versions. I avoid them like the
plague, but only because they just wouldn't work for me. My computers all
have to be members of domains, and you can't do that with computers running
Windows versions that don't have policy editors.)
If you boot into Safe Mode (hit F8 key repeatedly after passing the BIOS
screen at startup time, you may be able to log in as Administrator (no
password) and fix the system. I say "may" because it's possible that the
system doesn't think your "Owner" account has been damaged sufficiently to
warrant allowing the automatic logon to the built-in Administrator account.
The problem is that you have done some damage (from what I can tell) to your
profile, but it may not be totally disabled. In that case you may have to
straighten things out from within the farkled Owner account.
In the future please remember the first rule of holes: When you are in over
your head, stop digging! You really must learn something about the way Vista
handles its user accounts and the way ntfs permissions work before trying to
do the sort of invasive manipulations you've been doing. Were you not seeing
warnings from User Account Control as you made these various changes? UAC
wasn't turned off, was it?
You see, each user account has its own location for storing its profile. You
started off, apparently, with an "Owner" account. That was probably set up by
the OEM that installed the OS on your computer. Once you log on to any
account in Windows a profile location with that name on the directory
structure is created, and that may have been done effectively even before you
ever got the computer by the unattended install method used by the OEM. Now,
you could have changed name of the Owner account to one that suited you
through the Windows Control Panel | User Accounts interface, but the name of
the DIRECTORY where the profile for that account is stored would not (and
should not) be changed at that point. If you do change the name of that
directory the account won't be able to find its profile at boot time, and it
will create another one, usually with an extension added to the name.
I don't know what to tell you now. You might just be better off saving any
data to an external drive or to another system and then doing a fresh
re-installation of the OS -- assuming the OEM has provided recovery media or
a recovery partition. You might also learn quite a bit by trying to fix this.
It doesn't sound as though the system is really messed up badly, but it could
be pretty difficult for someone who isn't familiar with the way user accounts
and the file system work to fix.
BTW, if you do a fresh re-installation, maybe you'll be happiest if you
create a new account for yourself with your own name. Its profile will be
stored under the name you choose for the account. That user account could be
a non-admin user, and you would reserve the use of the Owner account for
administrative purposes. The neat thing about Vista is that, when you are
logged in as a non-admin and try to do something that requires admin
privileges, UAC will prompt you for credentials instead of just refusing to
do the task. You would then enter "Owner" as the admin name and the password
for the "Owner" account in order to be able to proceed with the task. It's a
recommended way of using Vista. When you're logged in as an admin and try to
do something that requires admin credentials UAC will simply ask you if you
wish to proceed. If you choose yes it assumes you know what you're doing and
activates the admin credentials to perform the task. (That's the default
setting, anyway.)
I hope you get it figured out. I can imagine that this situation is very
annoying.
