Many times it is convenient to create a special administrator account that can be used for the task scheduler.
Unfortunately, if your Windows 7 computer is not joined to a domain, any accounts you create are shown at the start-up screen:
It would look better if you could remove this special account from the welcome screen, and only show real user accounts.
How can you remove this from the welcome screen?
Well, it happens that there is a registry key that will allow you to do this. Before I start to tell you what it is – I want to give you a word of warning:
Hide the wrong account, and you could lock yourself out forever. If you hose your system, don’t come crying to me
Ok, now that we got that out of the way, open regedit and drill down to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\
Under this key, you will need to create two sub keys. First create a key named “SpecialAccounts”, and under that key create another named “UserList”.
The final registry path will look like this:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList
It is possible those keys already exist, and if they do then, hey, you get to skip a step
Next you need to create a new DWORD value under that key.
The value name is the exact username that you want to hide.
The numerical value is a 0 or a 1. If you set it to 0, then the account will be hidden. Set it to 1, and it will be shown.
You can see here that I have created a value for my SchedAccount:
After closing regedit, and switching back to the welcome screen we can see that the SchedAccount is no longer displayed:
This is a simple and fast way to hide an account, but at the same time please be very careful.
To drive home the point – look at the UAC prompt when I disabled all accounts, except a limited user account:
That YES button looks really clickable doesnt it? Yea right, now were stuck. No way of ever getting admin rights on the system again. Once you are in this state, you will need to restore from backup. So check twice before making those registry changes.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Steve. I know you gave us fair warning, but about 6 months ago I was messing with this reg key on my Vista system. I made the exact mistake you showed at the end of the article. I have been limping along with it for all this time, and dread doing a format/reload
Any way to get my system back without reloading the OS?
you might try using a registry editor tool outside the windows instance. there are a few ways to gain access to this – contact me directly if you need an idea.
You could try Bart’s PE to create a bootable windows DVD and then you could open the registry from there. The website for that is http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder
Not sure if Bart’s will let you see Windows 7 registry dat files tho…another avenue would be to create a Windows 7 PE from the install disk. and then run regedit from there. That is a little complicated…and maybe I should write an article about it
Biggest problem with this is that in Win7 there is no longer any way to log in to a “hidden” account. At least in XP you could Ctrl-Alt-Del twice from the Welcome screen and log in using such an account. So you can’t hide admin accounts that you need to administer a system in workgroup mode.
This is true, and annoying…but you can still use those hidden accounts for services and scheduled tasks…but it does make the hidden accounts less useful.
AFTAT HIDDEN A ACCOUNT HOW CAN I OPEN IT???
PLEASE TELL ME…
I just decided to experiment with the hidden account on my laptop. My laptop has pre-installed Toshiba Facial recognition software. The way that this program works is that after you register your face it adds an extra icon to the welcome screen. You click the icon and it uses the built in camera to register your face and log you in. I have used this for awhile just because it’s kinda fun to not have to type in a password (even though it takes longer) and i suddenly though, what if I could use this to log into my hidden account without un-hiding it. Well I tried it and it works, without un-hiding the account I can log in to it and none are the wiser from looking at the welcome screen, because very few people use any type of facial recognition to log in anyway, but it is not unusual to have it set up.
Edit: I do not know if this works with other facial recognition programs