Windows 2000 -> XP auto-logon feature killing me

Factual Questions
1

In Windows 2000, when you open your user account, there is an option to automatically log on the user, bypassing the standard login screen for standalone systems. Where is this feature in XP?

I have recently acquired a “new” computer that is only 4 years old to upgrade my 10 year old clunker. My buddy had Windows 2000 on it, with it set to log on automatically with his user account. I left this enabled when I upgraded to XP.

Then I created my account, and another account that will be sharing the machine. I deleted my buddy’s account, and set it up for Welcome Screen logon. (Nice graphical “click the user” interface. I love it.)

Now, every time I turn on the computer, it fails when trying to automatically log on the now-deleted user account. If I create a new user with that same name, I get no errors, but it automatically logs that new user in, bypassing the Welcome screen.

This is extremely irritating. Any help would be much appreciated. How can I tell it to stop auto-logging in? I want the Welcome Screen, dammit!

2

Set HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\AutoAdminLogon to 0.

Search on http://msdn.microsoft.com/ for “AutoAdminLogon” for more information.

3

Oh man, I can’t tell you how many registry searches I tried, and help file searches, and searches upon searches. Looking at the answer you gave, clearly I don’t know squat about how to do effective searches.

Thank you very much. You rule. I’m going to go try that now.

4

In your defense, it’s not exactly intuitive to stick the word “Admin” in the middle of “AutoLogin”, and if you don’t, your searches aren’t very fruitful. :smiley:

5

Also, there are a bunch of tools that let you do this interactively (instead of through the registry). Both of these are freeware.

Micrsoft’s TweakUI

System Internal’s autologon.