Since I had to work my way through this problem, I thought I would post the information.

First off, I don’t use Windows for anything other than the occasional game of “Lords of the Realm”, nor do I recommend anyone be silly enough to load a virus like that on a computer you want to actually use. I was foisted into this issue because I upgraded notebooks and decided to be a nice guy. A friend of mine had a daughter starting Junior High and thought a notebook would come in handy for writing papers and such. They, of course, wanted the original Windows XP installed on it. I had long since given up on anything Microsoft produced. The notebook had Ubuntu on it for quite a while, but I had the original stuff, and like an idiot, agreed to do a wipe and re-install.

Oh, woe is me! What a stupid thing to agree to! It did let me get rid of some other Windows software which I had no use for, but had perfectly good licenses, so I was looking at this as more of a “shelf cleaning” exercise.

The original install media left the machine booting into Administrator without prompting for a password, even though a password was defined for the account. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it while I was loading all of the original distribution software, but then it started to nag me. I burned an entire evening and part of another doctor dorking around with this minor issue. Since the exact answer wasn’t posted on the Web in any place I could find, I decided to help someone else unfortunate enough to be loading a Microsoft product onto a machine. (It’s a shame the way we disrespect computers by loading Microsoft products on them.)

You need a Registry editor to fix this problem. I know, heavy sigh. I used the one from System Suite 8 Professional since I had bought and installed that on this computer to get them a descent firewall and virus protection. You need to click expand your way down to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Software
Microsoft
Windows NT
CurrentVersion
Winlogon

you click on Winlogon (don’t expand it by clicking the plus or whatever, just click on the entry.) On the right side will appear a bunch of cryptic names and values. You are looking for something similar to AdministratorAutoLogon. You will see it has a value of “1” if your problem is the same as mine. Change this value to “0”, save, and reboot. You will now see the Welcome screen.

If you have some desperate need to have the Administrator account appear on your Welcome screen you need to a little farther down under Winlogon to:
SpecialAccounts
UserList

On the right side you need to either add or modify the DWORD value having a name which matches the Administrator name exactly. A value of 0 keeps it off of the screen and a value of 1 puts it on the screen.

That’s it. One more icky nasty Windows problem taken care of.