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:
- Create a new key named SpecialAccounts. Find the Winlogon key, right-click with the mouse and select New->Key and name it SpecialAccounts.
- Next you want to select the SpecialAccounts key you just created, right-click with the mouse and select New->Key and name it UserList.
- 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.