I want this old Thinkpad with Windows 98 on it to boot quickly into a ready-to-go state without doing any logins. It doesn’t talk to a network or the internet or run any antivirus or other security software. It just listens to instruments to record their readings, and runs software installed from original distribution CDs, and writes text files onto thumb drives to move results to a network that has all that security and protection stuff.
It had several users configured, including me as an admin. I deleted all the others. If I delete myself as the last user, will it just behave as if multiple users and logons had never been invented, booting into a ready-to-use state? Or will it die forever useless because there’s no way it can interact with people ever again, even to change it back? The only reasonable answer is the boot ready to go one. Therefore I figure it’s the useless death one, instead.
I don’t know about your solution, but if you don’t need a network, you could just hit ‘Cancel’ on the login screen. If you want to automatically log in as a regular user, the Win98 version of TweakUI can do that.
I never really used Windows 98 but in Windows 95, if I recall correctly, the act of logging in simply unlocked a file which stored passwords for network resources such as shared drives and printers or dialup networking. The login prompt did nothing to restrict access to the the local machine. You could always hit escape to get past it. Presumably the file system is FAT or FAT32 which has no access security. There weren’t really “users” in the same sense as you get with modern 32 bit Windows.
So … I think you’ll be fine if you delete that last user. The only thing is that I’m not sure when you say you’ve deleted the other users. Did you just delete a file or is there actually a user maintenance area? I don’t remember any user maintenance area in 95 so if there is in 98 then perhaps 98 was significantly different. Those password files had a .pwl extension. I seem to remember a solution if they got corrupted was to simply delete *.pwl. It just meant you would be prompted for a password next time you dialed up your ISP or tried to connect to a network share.