Hiding the user account on the login page (XP)

In many families, a PC is used by several users. You want to hide the mandatory account with administrator rights from the eyes of your curious children, while also disabling it on the initial login screen. You can selectively hide accounts on the welcome screen. For that, log in as the system administrator and start the Registry Editor. Navigate to the key ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList’. Right-click on the empty space at the right side of the window. Enter a new DWORD value by going to ‘New | DWORD Value’ and name it as the user account that needs to be hidden on the Windows start page. Open the new entry and set its ‘Value’ to ‘0’ and exit the registry editor. When you start the system next time, the respective account will have disappeared from the welcome screen. You can bring up the hidden account by pressing [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Del] twice to bring up the login dialog. You will need to keep the keys pressed till Windows switches over from the usual login page to the old-style screen with the dialog box. Now enter the name of the user account under ‘User name’ with the relevant password and click ‘OK’. You can also revert back to the normal login method by deleting the DWORD value created.