How to Hide a User Account in XP

You can hide a user account from the Welcome screen in Windows XP, but it requires editing the Windows registry. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do it unless you use a third party application. I’ll explain both ways in this article.
Note that when you hide a user account in Windows XP, it’s better if you are running Windows XP Professional rather than XP Home edition. Why? Well, once you hide an account, it will no longer show up on the main login screen, so how do you access it?

Well in XP Pro, you can press CTRL + ALT + DEL twice to get the old Windows 2000 login box and type in the user name and password to access the hidden user account. But if you have XP Home, this trick does not work and the only way to access your hidden account is to start the computer in Safe Mode, which is major pain if you want to use that account often.
So before doing this, make sure you are running XP Pro otherwise you will not have normal access to your account.

Hide User Account in XP

Step 1: Open the Windows Registry editor by clicking on Start, then Run, and typing in regedit.
Step 2: Navigate the the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ SpecialAccounts\UserList

Step 3: Now right-click on UserList and create a new DWORD value and name it exactly what the user name you want to hide is. For value, give it a value of 0. 0 Means hide the user account and 1 means show the user account.
As you can see from below, I added “Aseem Kishore” to the UserList as a new DWORD key with a value of 0. Make sure that the name you enter matches exactly with the user name displayed on the Welcome screen. So if you want to hide the Administrator account, type in “Administrator”, etc.

Step 4: Close the registry editor and reboot your computer. Now press CTRL + ALT + DEL twice and you should be able to type in the user name and password to access the hidden account!
You can also download a free program from IntelliAdmin that will do the same thing for you, but make it much easier. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and you’ll see a link for the program.

It’s called XP User Hide and you can simply check off which user accounts you want to hide and it will modify the registry for you. You can learn more about User Acounts in Windows here