Many times it is convenient to create a special administrator account that can be used for the task scheduler.
Unfortunately, if your Windows 7 computer is not joined to a domain, any accounts you create are shown at the start-up screen:
It would look better if you could remove this special account from the welcome screen, and only show real user accounts.
How can you remove this from the welcome screen?
Well, it happens that there is a registry key that will allow you to do this. Before I start to tell you what it is – I want to give you a word of warning:
Hide the wrong account, and you could lock yourself out forever. If you hose your system, don’t come crying to me
Ok, now that we got that out of the way, open regedit and drill down to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\
Under this key, you will need to create two sub keys. First create a key named “SpecialAccounts”, and under that key create another named “UserList”.
The final registry path will look like this:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList
It is possible those keys already exist, and if they do then, hey, you get to skip a step
Next you need to create a new DWORD value under that key.
The value name is the exact username that you want to hide.
The numerical value is a 0 or a 1. If you set it to 0, then the account will be hidden. Set it to 1, and it will be shown.
You can see here that I have created a value for my SchedAccount:
After closing regedit, and switching back to the welcome screen we can see that the SchedAccount is no longer displayed:
This is a simple and fast way to hide an account, but at the same time please be very careful.
To drive home the point – look at the UAC prompt when I disabled all accounts, except a limited user account:
That YES button looks really clickable doesnt it? Yea right, now were stuck. No way of ever getting admin rights on the system again. Once you are in this state, you will need to restore from backup. So check twice before making those registry changes.
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