Why are two Administrator-level accounts required?

[Joel Moore]

Why is it that XP Pro requires there to be two administrative accounts (the
default Administrator account and the one that you manually add when
installing)?

I wanted my personal account to be a limited user account but XP tells me I
have to have at least one administrative account on the system and doesn't
let me change the type to "limited". I can't even delete it. Why can't I
just have the one Administrator account?

It seems like a waste and besides, if I never use one or the other to
perform my administrative tasks, I'll surely forget the password making it
useless anyway.

Joel Moore

 

[Jim Cavalaris [MS]]

this limitation is imposed by the user interface for the shell's
"User Accounts" control panel applet only.

on Windows XP Professional, you can still use the "Local Users and
Groups" MMC snap-in directly to create user accounts that are members
of the "Users" group only (i.e. limited users) without having to
create any additional Administrators group users.

"Local Users and Groups" is available by running: lusrmgr.msc
or via the "Computer Management" snap-in: compmgmt.msc

hope this helps,
jim.

 

[Joel Moore]

this limitation is imposed by the user interface for the shell's
"User Accounts" control panel applet only.

on Windows XP Professional, you can still use the "Local Users and
Groups" MMC snap-in directly to create user accounts that are members
of the "Users" group only (i.e. limited users) without having to
create any additional Administrators group users.

"Local Users and Groups" is available by running: lusrmgr.msc
or via the "Computer Management" snap-in: compmgmt.msc

hope this helps,
jim.

Not exactly the answer but you led me to it.

I already knew how to create limited users (which can actually be done from
both the Control Panel applet and the MMC snap-in). The problem was that
the Control Panel applet wouldn't let me change the account type (from
administrative to limited) of the account added during install (not the
default administrator account, the one added later). But I was able to
delete it from the MMC snap-in so now I'm down to one Administrator
account.

Thanks,

Joel Moore

 

[Kent W. England [MVP]]

Administrator is your emergency backup admin account for when your
day-to-day admin account gets hosed, locked out, the password expires or
one of a hundred other glitches shuts you out. This avoids a reinstall
of XP. You could make both passwords the same to avoid confusion.