Mr. Abell, a follow up on the no local admin account

[Lisa]

Just thought I would try to get your attention again. Any
other ideas on this problem.

With XP you can not log in while in safe mode with the
administrator account if it is disabled. I am about
ready to reload.

Why would Microsoft allow a person to disable an account
while logged in as that account? I can see renaming the
admin acct. but disabling it? And being able to disable
the account you are logged in as??? Why?

-----Original Message-----
she is telling me she is not able to log in as
administrator in safe mode with the account being
disabled. Should she be able to log in with the admin
account if it is disabled while logging into safe mode?

.

..

 

[Guest]

I failed to mention it was XP Pro. I saw somewhere you
can press ctrl-alt-del at the welcome screen twice and log
in as a disabled administrator account. Can you verify
this?

 

[Guest]

No matter how much idiot proofing M$ adds, there is always
something...

Don't ask why they allow it. More blocking of
functionality to prevent stupidity hurts everyone by
taking power from the users. There is too much of that
already; I half expect in 10 years to be unable to
configure anything besides eye candy because "users are
too stupid to have access to that." Ask instead why you
would do this to yourself? Are you just clicking random
things? You can also deny access to your hard disk to
everyone, including the os. But why would you? You can
delete a decent chunk of the OS from the windows folder,
and if you do enough it can't self repair without the
disk. But why would you?

Try booting from the xp disk and repairing the accounts. I
am not sure if it will work, or even if its avail as I
have not had to do this since nt 4. But give it a shot.

 

[Guest]

I will try to boot to the XP disk and repair the install.
If you would have read my message you would have
discovered that I was not the one to do this. I work as a
network admin and support around 600 nodes. You would be
suprised to see some of the things end users do. As
network admins it is our job to try to prevent end users
from doing things that damage their computers. I would
think MSFT would have the same responsibility. If only
local admins can disable accounts why would MSFT allow a
person to disable the account they are logged on as? Keep
in mind this is in a workgroup or a local environment. We
are talking home users here. There is no network admin to
come and fix the problem. I installed the software and
sent them on their merry way. You asked why would you???
This is people that are over 60 and didn't grow up with PC
such as we did. Why would you want to turn them lose to
do whatever they want to do? That is just asking for
trouble? Or is your idea to only have users who have an
MBA to use PCs? My parents use PCs and they are in their
60s also. I monitor it closely though.

So from your message I take it that you think it ok that
the accounts can be deleted while logged in as that user?
And that the admin account can be disabled? I can see
renamed but disabled???

 

[Roger Abell [MVP]]

Sorry, I have been away.
It is possible that your Administrator account has been
renamed. Whatever its present name is, if you log in with
that account in a safe mode boot you are supposed to
succeed. In earlier versions of Windows this account
could not be disabled, without a later tool being used,
and could not become locked out.
With this version of Windows a change was made due to
people not liking having the account always available
for people to attempt to access over the network.
The built-in is supposed to always work for login when
using a safe mode boot. If as it seems you are experiencing
otherwise, and you are sure that the built-in was not renamed
and then another account defined with Administrator as the
name, then I do not know what is up with your machine,
except that it is not behaving as XP does when correct.