Removing a user from Welcome Screen in Windows XP

One of the side effects in welcome screens is listing all the user accounts on the system. Here comes a way of hiding the user account from displaying in the welcome screen. This method features the way in which Microsoft hides the system accounts.

This can be done by a simple hack in registry. In order to hide a user from the welcome screen follow these steps.

1) Click on the start button and select Run, then type regedit in box and click ok.

[just press windows + r key and type tat]

2) In the Registry Editor dialog box, in the left frame expand the following, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, Windows NT, Current Version, Winlogon, SpecialAccounts, and UserList.

3) Now a list of account names or part of account names will be displayed, that the system will look for and hide. To hide an user just right click and select New => DWORD value. DWORD value is a specific data type of an entry in the system registry. In short, the DWORD data type allows an integer value to be stored.

4) When a new key created, enter the name of the user account which you want to hide in the name of the user’s account text box.

5) Now close the Registry Editor.

6) After reboot or log off that user account will not be displayed in the welcome screen.

If you want to log into the user account which you hid from the welcome screen, just press CTRL+ALT+DEL twice, after this welcome screen will be displayed in the windows 2000 form, in that dialog box type your username and password and log in.

In this way you can hide an account from others.

If you want that account to be displayed as usual, just delete that DWORD entry that you created in the registry editor list and now everything will be back the way it was.