Odd behaviour with user accounts (accounts "hidden")

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nimral
  • Start date Start date
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Nimral

Hi all,

does anyone have an explanation for the following behaviour, which I
have observed on 2 different Windows XP (SP-2) machines, which are not
(and never have been) a member of a domain, and (as far as one can
tell) are mostly on their installation defaults:

I have 4 accounts: administrator and guest (created by the XP
installation), dad and kids. Like always guest is disabled,
administrator, dad and kids are members of the local "administrators"
group. To enhance security somewhat I want to remove the Kids from the
"Administrators" group.

* As soon as I remove "kids" from the administrators group the account
is not displayed any more on the login-screen, in other words my kids
need to use the alt-strg-del trick to access their account. As soon as
I put the kids account back into the administrators group it does
re-appear on the login-screenl. I also tried this with a different,
newly created account "test" as well: as long as I leave "Test" in the
administrators group I can select it for login, if I remove Test I
need Alt-Strg-Del to access it.

* Searched the documentations and the user management console up and
down, and found no option to make an account visible or invisible.

* I heard that Tweakui has the ability to control the visibility of
accounts, I downloaded that tool and tried it. It seems that I can
control the invisibility of accounts beeing a member of the
administrators group there, but I cannot control the visibility of the
"kids" account, as soon as I remove it from the amdinistrators group
it is no longer visible in Tweakui as well.

Who has an explanation for this behaviour, a link to the
documentation, or any other way how I can make the "Kids" account
visible when it is not a member of the "Administrators" group?

Thanks,

Armin
 
Do you add kids to Users group?
Click to expand...

Sometimes it's the simple things that make life easy :-) Indeed the
kids account was not a member of Users any more. I put Kids into
Users, and the login screen works like intended.

It is still a miracle though, how Kids got removed from the "Users"
group. If you create a new account ot is automatically added to users,
and I put kids into administrators later, so the kids account has been
a member of 2 groups: users and administrators.

I *never* removed kids from the "Users" group, nor did anyone else,
and more than that, nobody removed kids from the Users group on 2
different, completely independent machines. And moreover, I meanwhile
found a third machine (XP home), where another ex-admin account is not
a member of any group any more.

I am, however, not able to reproduce the problem: if I put kids into
administrators and remove it again, kids remains a member of the
"Users" group, like expected.

Conclusion: there must be a dumb automatism somewhere in XP, probably
one of Microsoft's "Security enhancements", that removes users from
the "users" group.

Any ideas?

....Armin
 
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