Hiding User Accounts on Windows 7

I recently needed to create a local user account for a project which involved using the Microsoft Great Plains Dynamics eConnect product.  eConnect product uses some COM+ components and needs to have a user account during installation to properly setup the components.  I decided the simple thing to do was to create a user named econnect just for this purpose.

The Problem

You can see when I go to User Accounts the new account shows up.  I expect the account to show up here :

Everything works just fine but can be a bit of an annoyance when booting up and logging into Windows 7 where I have the option of logging into my regular account or my new econnect user account.  I don’t want this behavior, I just want to be shown my normal enter password textbox as I am familiar.  Since this is a service account and no on will ever log in to it, I don’t want the option of seeing it.

It turns out there is some registry hacking that one can do to provide a list of users you want to hide from the system.  Be warned that you could possibly add your own account to the list and be locked out of Windows 7 completely.

Hiding a User Account

The process is actually pretty simple, you need to fire up regedit to get started.  Once regedit is running traverse to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\

Once you have found the path in regedit the steps are pretty simple:

1. Create a new key named SpecialAccounts.  Find the Winlogon key, right-click with the mouse and select New->Key and name it SpecialAccounts.
2. Next you want to select the SpecialAccounts key you just created, right-click with the mouse and select New->Key and name it UserList.
3. Finally, select the key just created which is named UserList, right-click and select New->DWORD Value or New->DWORD (32-bit) Value on 64-bit systems and name the value the name of the user you want to hide.  In my case, econnect is the user I am trying to hide.  The value should be 0 to hide the user or 1 to not hide user.

It should look something like this:

You can repeat step 3 above for each user to hide.

And that’s all there is too it.  If done correctly, the user will not show up on a logon screen or even when managing user accounts.