A neighbor of mine called, she had recently purchased a computer from someone and it was password protected at the login screen. She was not successful in getting the password from the person she bought it from.
Luckily, in this case anyway, that the Login password is not the securest thing in the world. With old versions of Windows you could just sign in under a different name and password. With XP however, an account has to be created previously, to sign in.
To get pass it, I simply started up the computer in Safe Mode, by pressing the F8 key repeatedly as the computer was booting up until the startup menu appeared.
I then chose Safe Mode from the menu choices. When it started up, there was two accounts listed. The one I was trying to bypass and a one called Administrator. The latter, Administrator, is the one I picked.
Then when the computer finished booting up I just went to the Control Panel then User Accounts, and created a new account for the owner of the computer (with administrative rights). Before deleting the old account I restarted the computer to make sure she could access the computer through the newly created account first. It worked fine.
Administrative rights - a term you may encounter more than once when referring to WinXP. Basically, a person with administrative rights can change any setting within Windows (or install anything) while someone without those rights may be limited on what you can set up on the computer or what system changes you can make.
Anybody can have administrative rights. How do you know who? Just click on Start then Settings and then Control Panel - I've turned off most of the fancy graphics of WinXP and use the classic look of the menu - if this is not your case then just clicking on Start and you should see the Control Panel option right away.
Then double-click on the User Accounts. You should see a list of all accounts that are set up on that computer. Look for the words Administrator by someone's name and that person is the Administrator for your computer. Its possible that all users may have administrative rights.
So if you where trying to install a program but you get an error message saying you need administrative rights to do so, you would have to Log off yourself (if you don't have rights) and sign in under someone who does have the rights.
Here are some links to help confuse you further: :-)