Windows 98 - Automate the Windows logon

Installing a patch, changing the network settings or an application causes a small annoying phenomenon in Windows 98: The Windows logon appears at every system start and requires a user name and password - even if the latter does not exist and you are the only user.

Windows 98 - Skip the annoying login

Important: Please be careful, as there is a risk that errors may occur with networks if you reset to the conventional login, which is recommended in this tip, among others.

Windows will ask for a restart during the following steps - do not comply with this vehement request. You can get rid of the annoying field as follows.

1. Start your PC with Windows 98 and click on Start/Settings/Control Panel. Here you choose Passwordsenter your old password and leave the two lower fields blank.

Make sure under Passwords also that in the register User profiles the setting The same default and desktop settings apply to all users of this computer is active.

2. In the control panel, click on Network and select Windows login from.

3. Now click on Start/Search and type .pwl in. Name all results from .pwl in .old and save them in a special directory. This step is required to deactivate all previous user passwords - these also cause the password prompt.

4. Open the Registration-editor by selecting Start/Execute click and regedit type in.

5. Navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Winlogon. Right-click in the right-hand pane and select New/string. Now name this self-created value AutoAdminLogon (if not already present, without quotation marks), double-click on it and type a 1 into it. In this way, create the following values with corresponding content:

- DefaultUsername with your user name.
- DefaultPassword with your password.

6. Close the registry editor and restart your PC. After this restart, the user login has disappeared.

Interesting: If you don't dare to use the Windows registry, you can easily follow the last three steps with the useful Microsoft tool TweakUI 1.33 in just a few seconds.

Simply download TweakUI 1.33 and use WinAce to unpack the ZIP archive. In the newly created folder, click with the right mouse button on Tweakui.inf and select from the context menu the entry Install. Now open the Control Panel and double-click on TweakUI 1.33 German.

After starting the program, switch to the tab Logon. Select Automatic login at system startup and enter the user name/password. Before doing so, deactivate the option Delete last user in the register Paranoia. After the obligatory confirmation with OK a restart is sufficient for the effect to take effect.

This note comes from Damian Dandik, webmaster of www.windows-netzwerke.de - A big thank you goes to him!

NOTE FOR NEW PUBLICATION: This article was produced by Sandro Villinger and comes from the Windows Tweaks archive, which has been built up since the late 1990s.