Enabling the Administrator Account for Logon in Vista Beta2 5384

Those of you who have downloaded and installed Windows Vista Beta 2 (build 5384) may have noticed something annoying: unless you join a domain, it is awfully difficult to logon to the built in Administrator account.

To work around this:

1. Logon as the account you created during the installation.
2. From the Start menu, go to "All Programs", "Accessories"
3. Right-click on "Command Prompt" and choose "Run as Administrator"
4. Click "Allow" from the ConsentUI prompt
5. In the resulting Command window, enter "regedit" and press enter
6. In regedit, browse to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
7. Add a new key at that level called SpecialAccounts
8. In the SpecialAccounts key, create a sub-key called UserList
9. At this point the path is: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList
10. In the UserList key, create a new value of type DWORD (32 bit) called Administrator and set the value to 1.
11. From the command prompt enter: "net user Administrator /Active:yes"
12. Reboot, and now you can logon to the Administrator account

For those of you who join your computer to a domain, you can easily logon as the local administrator account using Switch User, as long as you have enabled the account.

http://windowsconnected.com/blogs/je...6/08/3007.aspx


A really neat tip.

I guess they will be "sort of" enabling the 'only run as limited user account' policy?! ;)