administratoruser-accountswindows 7
Can anyone please tell me how to hide admin account from the welcome screen without disabling it?
The method that uses the SpecialAccounts registry key does disable the account, so you can no longer enter the admin password to run elevated tasks from a limited account.
The solution should be usable by Home editions of Windows, so if it requires a group-policy, please also include the registry entry that the group-policy editor alters.
You can of course use tools listed before this post or Ophcrack. I think it would be a good idea to also figure out why your computer froze and why it changed or corrupted your password. Forcing the power off on your computer should not change your password. This is an indication that something else is wrong. You probably either have malicious software or a dying hard drive that just happened to corrupt files critical for logging in. I think a virus is more likely. I would first check the S.M.A.R.T status of the drive (if your lucky it'll tell you if it is dying). I would then backup any critical information and then take the hard drive out and run as many different virus scanning products on it as you can from another computer. This site might help.
This isn't the solution to the exact question you asked, but will accomplish your goal of being able to elevate to the administrator account but not have it show up on the login screen.
Here's what you need to do. Use the special accounts registry entry to hide the administrator account (and whatever other accounts you want to hide) from the login screen. Then, configure UAC to prompt for both a username and password, instead of just showing the clickable usernames. This will let you elevate to one of the hidden accounts, because it behaves much like the "do not display last username" setting does for the login. This is what it will look like; you can type in any (administator's) username:
In order to configure this, all you have to do is create one registry value. Go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies and create a key called CredUI if it doesn't already exist. Then, within CredUI, create a DWORD called EnumerateAdministrators with the value 0x00000000. That's it! Now you can elevate to any account you want, and hide any account you want.
If you don't want to edit the registry by hand, you can paste the following code into notepad, and save it as a file with a .reg extension, then open the file to add the data to the registry.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\CredUI]
"EnumerateAdministrators"=dword:00000000
Best Answer
In the Registry, you can create a list of accounts to hide at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList. Create a REG_DWORD value namedAdministrator, with0as data to hide it (any other value will have no effect).