Ok, I had one of those rare scenarios, but someone else may benefit from the result. I had a user that, for whatever reason, couldn’t log into their local account. They had tried everything they knew. I walked them through a nice local password hack, but the program failed on boot. Heck, maybe I’ll share that later. Anyway, so they were kinda stuck and I didn’t feel like having them ship me the computer. They are a coastal dweller. So, they were sitting at the login screen and saying, “Ok Paul, what next?” Sooooo, then a simple idea came to me. The login screen was in the simple XP one, not the classic login screen. Yeah, like the one at the top. I seemed to remember (egads!) that they had an administrator account on the machine that wasn’t showing. Problem was, it wasn’t showing as a selection.
I got to thinking (something I rarely do) and wondered if there was a way to switch it. Well, it just so happens that there is. All you have to do is to CTRL-ALT-DEL twice and it will automagically switch over to the classic login. 
Now you can type the username that is not shown and voila, you’re in. You can also change this permanenlty within Control Panel > User Accounts >Change the Way Users Log On and Off.
[tags]XP Logon, Welcome Screen trick, XP login[/tags]
does the reverse work also? I have a machine in a domain but I no longer want the login screen. the stardard simple version would be nicer.
I’ll have to remember that one! Classic logins are annoying.
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that works well on PCs but its not woking on laptops. any solution