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.

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, select Passwords, enter your old password and leave the two lower fields blank.

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

2. Now click on Network in the Control Panel and select Windows logon.

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

4. Open the registry editor by clicking Start/Run and typing regedit.

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-made value AutoAdminLogon (if not already present, without quotation marks), double-click on it and type 1. 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 will have disappeared.

Interesting: You can also follow this procedure of the last three steps within a few seconds with the useful Microsoft tool TweakUI 1.33, if you don't dare to use the Windows registry.

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

After starting the program, switch to the Logon tab. Select Automatically log in at system start and enter the user name/password. Before doing so, deactivate the Delete last user option in the Paranoia tab, as shown in the tip. After the obligatory confirmation with OK, a restart is sufficient for the effect to take effect.

This tip 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.