I have been trying to help a friend who had a login problem with Win XP Home edition (OEM, Compaq Presario 5310, they cannot find the recovery CD). THey were having the problem of getting logged off as soon as they logged in. Anyway to make a long story short after trying a ton of things that did not work I made a real mess of things (I did one of the steps here, http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_sys32.htm) renamed c:\windows\system32\config\system to system.bak after I thought I had copied a repiar file). Now I cannot get to the recovery console because it will not accept the default blank admin password, when I try to use a Win XP CD it does not see the previous installation and therefore does not offer the 'repair' option. What is killing me is I can see what is going on with the NTFS floppy. If only I could rename that file 'system.bak' BACK to 'system'. THis bootdisk will only let you copy to FAT but not NTFS! Does anyone know of a utility that will let me boot from the floppy drive and rename a file? Or copy over a file?

For XP Home Edition, you cannot access the "Administrator" account unless you boot into safe mode first. If you try to access it normally, you should get an error message like "unable to logon dueto account restrictions" or something like that. Press F8 during boot up to access Safe Mode and the Administrator account on XP Home Edition.