Broken Vista account

Something that has often made me chuckle about Windows is it’s ability to break the user account you are using.  This often comes via malware or a virus, but it’ll change your accounts Group Policies to stop you launching all the stuff required to fix it such as control panel, user and groups, etc.

One half useful thing about Vista and Windows 7 is the fact that the admin account exists but is disabled and doesn’t have a password set, this is due to having that lovely UAC elevation built in now.  It’s great that MS learnt and ripped off sudo from Unix but it’s poorly implemented, sorry, I digress.

If your account is corrupt, you’re locked out of doing tons of stuff and you just want to get in to the system to start a fresh, try this:

Enable the admin account:

Windows Key + R to get a Run box
Type “net user administrator /active:yes” and press ctrl+shift+enter
You’ll be asked if you want to run this as an admin, of course you do.

Log out and you’ll see Administrator on the welcome screen.  Log in as the admin, there won’t be a password required.  Go to control panel, and create a user, give it admin privs and log back out.  Now log in as your new user.

Disable the admin account:

Windows Key +R again
Type “net user administrator /active:no” and press ctrl+shift+enter
You’ll be asked if you want to run this as an admin, yes again.

Now just copy stuff from your old account in c:\users\oldaccount name and you’re done.