Windows – How to remove a user account which is invisible on the logon screen or user manager for Windows 7 Home Premium

Securityuser-accountswindows 7

I am running a Windows 7 Home Premium machine with one administrator and one standard user for my son (14). My son has a standard account limited by parental controls for web content (porn etc.)

My son has found a way to create a user account that does not show up on the logon screen, does not show up on the user management screen and cannot be access by Family Safety. The account shows up on the list for Family Safety, but I can't touch it. Folders for this account exist on the hard drive under the users folder.

I checked the Windows registry here HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList, as suggested on some web sites — but SpecialAccounts does not exist. This suggests that he did not hide the account by editing the registry.

Since I using Home Premium, I cannot unhide the user account using "Local users and groups".

I also tried a net user command, but it seems that I need to know the password of the phantom account to do anything to it. I also tried control userpasswords2, to no effect.

This is not the first time my son has created a phantom account. When I asked him how he did it, he refused to say.

I should add that my son is not a power user. He probably does not know that Windows has a registry — although some of his friends might know this if it was in their interests to acquire the information.

Question: How can a user of weak ability manage to hide a user account , and how can I unhide and remove the account?

Best Answer

If you have an account with Administrator-level permissions on the system, you should be able to delete the account using the net user command from an elevated command prompt.

In the Start Menu's search bar, type cmd. When "cmd.exe" is highlighted in the search results, press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER. You should get a UAC prompt. After the UAC prompt, you should see a CMD window with the title Administrator: C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe.

From there, use net user as you normally would to delete a user account: net user [username] /delete

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Windows 7 – Always Display Last User on Welcome Screen

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:

elevation

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

Windows 7 user account no longer on Welcome Screen

I'd first run a chkdsk /f on the drive to make sure the file system is still good. Then try this (source):

I managed to fix it by deleting a key from the registry. Click the Start menu and type regedt32. Navigate to the following key.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList In the profile list, there was one named .DEFAULT with no data within it. I deleted this key rebooted and all of my user icons were back on the logon screen.

Of course, you should have a backup of the registry key before deleting. I don't know why this suddenly changed. Hope this helps!

Best Answer

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