Preventing users from apearing on welcome screen

Does anyone know if there's a way to create a user in windows XP pro and prevent that user from showing up on the welcome screen ? I need this to be able to create additional users for file sharing purposes but prevent those accounts from being logged into via the welcome screen. I'm not even sure if this is possible. It seems like there should be a way to do it because i've seen OEM's have support accounts on some machines that do not appear in the welcome screen.

J.

What OS? XP Pro will allow you to do it through Computer Management via Local Users and Groups. You just need to create the users in a different folder than the Users Folder. Then you also need to change their group assignments to something other than Users.

Do you mean one like the admin account that appears only in safemode? Or do you want a button to show the accounts?

MS TweakUI has an option to 'Show x on Welcome Screen'. Just tick/untick box. Easy!

TweakUI will be great for my mcahine, but not for the office that i'm setting up. They wanted more flexibility than simple file sharing, but they did not want co-workers to have to be prompted for a username/password when accessing shared folders. It's really important that some users have access to certain files only. So i had to create user/passwords for each user on the network on each machine on the network. Keep in mind this is a workgroup with no domain controller or any other means of controlling users. I'm interested in using computer management to edit the user groups. I really don't want to install extra 3rd party tweak tools.

J.

juliendogg said:

TweakUI will be great for my mcahine, but not for the office that i'm setting up. They wanted more flexibility than simple file sharing, but they did not want co-workers to have to be prompted for a username/password when accessing shared folders. It's really important that some users have access to certain files only. So i had to create user/passwords for each user on the network on each machine on the network. Keep in mind this is a workgroup with no domain controller or any other means of controlling users. I'm interested in using computer management to edit the user groups. I really don't want to install extra 3rd party tweak tools.

J.

Click to expand...

you can simply do this:

* start regedit
* go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ Winlogon \ SpecialAccounts \ UserList \
* right click on an empty space in the right pane and select new > dword value
* name the value with the user account you want to exclude
* double click this new value and enter o as its value data
* when the branch "userlist" is selected, go to file > export and then export the registry branch so you can simply run this registry entry on every computer on the network
* close the registry editor

all you will need to do is double click on the .reg file to import the data into the other computer's registry. simple as that.

Thanks guys! I was able to get that working how i wanted. However, now i have another related problem. I opened up a new thread on this one. What i was looking for was to have a user, say share/share, that can be used to access my network shares. But i would like that user to have to log in with username/password. I can't seem to get that working. I can either allow everyone, or no one. I can't seem to get a username/password prompt when connecting to my laptop from over the network. This one is really driving me nutty. I had this happen before on another laptop and i ended up formatting and reinstalling to get the username/password prompt for network access working again. I really really dont' want to do that this time. If anyone has any ideas please post in my new thread "Problems with shared folder, xp pro". Thanks a bunch for all the advice guys!

J.