You do not say whether or not this is in a domain, or if you are at least a
local administrator. If you are, then you can view the user account
appropriately, almost certainly by looking in Documents and Settings for the
'profile' that was created for this account. If you are not an
administrator, then ask someone who is to find it for you.
I've had something like this happen exactly once, and like slamming a door
on my hand, once was enough. I changed my password on a Friday morning, but
did not need to log back in again all day. Monday morning, it wasn't
working. The admin detected no suspicious activity, no additional password
changes or lockouts between Friday and Monday morning. I simply remembered
something other than my new password, some other choice I had considered. It
happens, and your admins should not give you a hard time, even though you
say that this is not the first time.
That said, be careful about outsmarting yourself on account names, or
especially passwords. Account names are relatively insecure, and too easy to
find out, to worry too much about trying to "secure" them. Be aware of who
can and who cannot see who has logged in on a system.
As for secure passwords, there are dozens of ways to obfuscate something
that primarily exists in your mind: using acronyms from quotes, phrases, or
sentences. There is substituting numbers for words or letters. And, as you
have seen, there is using unexpected special characters in places that some
language's orthography does not require or even permit. "To be or not to be;
that is the question." can become anything as straightforward as
"2bon2b;titq.", to something as obscure as "T06||!2bE:T=t?", so long as you
can remember how to type it. That said, I avoid anything in Bartlett's
quotations, and favor memorably strange and memorable things people have
said to me, such as "No, sir, a frost and freeze are as different as night
and day!". If you can shoulder-surf me typing Nsaf&afradanad!, then it
probably doesn't matter what my password is, and it's time to look at
biometrics, or at least look for who installed a keystroke capture program.
