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 :

ManageUsersBefore

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:

RegeditUserList

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.

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