Did you know, it’s possible to hide a user from the blue XP login screen without having to delete the actual account?

There are two ways to do this..

Edit the Registry

Click on Start, Run and then type regedit.exe and press return.

Navigate to :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\
    CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList

Now add a new DWORD value with the the name of the user account you want to hide.

You can reveal the name again by deleting the DWORD value in the future.

Microsoft’s Tweak UI

Alternatively, you can use Microsoft’s free Tweak UI Power Tool to accomplish the same task.

Under the “Logon” section, you can select which accounts to show on the “Welcome Screen”.

Note that if at any point you want to still log in as the hidden user, press Ctrl-Alt+Delete twice while on the welcome screen and you’ll have a logon prompt where you can specify the username and password to log on as.

Ever seen this error when visiting a website?

Bad Request

Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Size of a request header field exceeds server limit.

Our client was receiving this error each time they visited their ISP’s webmail logon page.

The problem was due to a corrupt cookie previously generated by the website.   The easy solution is to delete all your cookies

To do this in IE go into Tools, Internet Options, then look for Browsing history

Press delete, then just select cookies

However, you may not want to delete all of your cookies as, after all, only one of them is corrupt.

In this case (IE and XP) – the cookies were stored under:

c:\documents and settings\<username>\Cookies

Find the cookie relating to the website you’re having trouble with, delete it and you should be able to access the site again.

If you have  a Windows XP machine which is not part of a domain and you’re unable to switch on the firewall because of the following message:

For your security, some settings are controlled by Group Policy

The fix is to :

1. Click Start, Run and type “regedit.exe”
2. Backup, then delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall
3. Restart PC

I’m often being asked this.   People assume that Office XP will only work with Windows XP – a cunning marketing plan by MS?

Office XP will run on Windows Vista fine.