Hiding a user from the Welcome screen in Windows XP
So, in the last article I detailed a solution to getting a legacy application to run under a limited user account in XP. This legacy application wasn’t working correctly without administrator priviliges and in this situation, upgrading to a newer version wasn’t a great option. So, I created a new user account with higher priviliges and used runas to launch the application with greater priviliges. But that left me with another problem…. how do I hide the new priviliged user from the Welcome screen?
To hide a user from the windows xp welcome screen….
Open up regedit (start, run, regedit) – navigate to the following registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList
Now, you will see a list of system users that are already hidden.
You should create a new DWord value – make this identical to the username that needs to be hidden.
The value should be 0 – setting the value to 1 will make the username appear on the welcome screen, 0 will keep the username hidden.
You have now hidden the username from xp’s welcome screen.
Also, if you’re at the welcome screen and need to be able to login as that user – use ctrl-alt-del twice to get the older style login (where you can type in the actual username.)