Wyskers
January 9th 05, 07:27 PM
Equipment:
Dell Dimension 8200
Windows XP Home Edition
Problem:
My sister-in-law's husband recently passed away, he was the one who
looked after configuring their computer and installing software. He
originally had the following user accounts on the computer ( "his Name", "
*** Family", "guest") , the account with his name, and the *** Family account
both have admin rights. I assume that he renamed the administrator account
to" *** Family" because adminstrator does not show up in C:\documents and
settings folder. My sister-in-law does not know the password to the "***
Family" account only the one the the "his Name" account. She tried to rename
this account via users and accounts in control panel but all this did was
change the name that appears on the log on screen. The issue she has with
this is that some applications that utilize the user name inserts "his name"
vice her new user name (MS Outlook, MS Word, etc) , in addition since it has
created another folder in the C:\documents and settings folder with the new
name of the account some applications display error messages stating that it
can't find the right folder to store something.
Unfortunately, I am running Windows XP Pro and the solutions that I
have available to me do not work on her machine, I have tried but with no
success. Is there a way to effectively wipe out all the user accounts,
including the main admin one(since we don't know what the pass word is or the
proper user name for it) with out having to reinstall windows and all the
applications on her machine? Are there registry settings that I can change
that will change the names of these accounts? I saw a help file on Google
that suggested to create a new account with admin privileges, log onto that
account, rename the account folder in C:\documents and settings folder to the
neame you want to use, then modify the account name in the following key in
the registry to the same name:
HKEY Local Machine/software/microsoft/winnt/current version/profile
list/{SID #}/profile image path = C:\documents and settings folder\"User name"
I have tried this on my machine and it works fine, but on hers I can't
rename the account, I get an access denied error, even though the new account
has admin rights. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Dell Dimension 8200
Windows XP Home Edition
Problem:
My sister-in-law's husband recently passed away, he was the one who
looked after configuring their computer and installing software. He
originally had the following user accounts on the computer ( "his Name", "
*** Family", "guest") , the account with his name, and the *** Family account
both have admin rights. I assume that he renamed the administrator account
to" *** Family" because adminstrator does not show up in C:\documents and
settings folder. My sister-in-law does not know the password to the "***
Family" account only the one the the "his Name" account. She tried to rename
this account via users and accounts in control panel but all this did was
change the name that appears on the log on screen. The issue she has with
this is that some applications that utilize the user name inserts "his name"
vice her new user name (MS Outlook, MS Word, etc) , in addition since it has
created another folder in the C:\documents and settings folder with the new
name of the account some applications display error messages stating that it
can't find the right folder to store something.
Unfortunately, I am running Windows XP Pro and the solutions that I
have available to me do not work on her machine, I have tried but with no
success. Is there a way to effectively wipe out all the user accounts,
including the main admin one(since we don't know what the pass word is or the
proper user name for it) with out having to reinstall windows and all the
applications on her machine? Are there registry settings that I can change
that will change the names of these accounts? I saw a help file on Google
that suggested to create a new account with admin privileges, log onto that
account, rename the account folder in C:\documents and settings folder to the
neame you want to use, then modify the account name in the following key in
the registry to the same name:
HKEY Local Machine/software/microsoft/winnt/current version/profile
list/{SID #}/profile image path = C:\documents and settings folder\"User name"
I have tried this on my machine and it works fine, but on hers I can't
rename the account, I get an access denied error, even though the new account
has admin rights. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.