Reset Vista

I have a new computer that's been sitting on my desk, waiting for me to have time to move everything over off my old computer. I only use it only occasionally, but have logged into it several times. So yesterday, as I was trying to transfer some music files over that I didn't want to store on the file server where I'd been putting everything from my old computer, I couldn't get my old computer to connect to the new one. I end up rebooting it, and when it comes back up, the password doesn't work. I don't know if I changed it or if a security update did something weird, but I was locked out. No other account to login with.

I found a nice Linux CD that boots you up to a registry editor that allows you to reset the passwords on accounts and enable or un-lockout accounts. The website itself was confusing to navigate, but once I found what I needed, it went pretty quick. I reset the password to something else a couple times. Nothing. I tried enabling the Administrator account and setting a password on that (since the Administrator account is disabled by default in Vista). No go.

So as I start looking through his FAQs, I find that setting the password is a bit flaky but just blanking the password should be pretty consistent. So I tried that and was in, and then within Windows I set the password to what it should have been all along. It won't let me change anything on the Administrator account, so I'll have to go disable that again, I guess.

When I was setting the password, I got this little hint from Vista: "If your password contains capital letters, they must be typed the same way every time you log on." Yes, thank you, but the question I have to ask is that if my password does not contain capital letters, does it not have to be typed the same way every time? If it's all lower case letters and numbers, do I not have to type my password the same way? I'm not sure I want to actually find out.