password/no password policy

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.group_policy (More info?)

I am mostly in application development, so the system is my weakest part. I
am running two Dell workstations with Win2K on each of four computers. For
some of them I would like a user to enter a PW on logon for others it is not
needed--just waste of time. In any event I would like to have this feature
turned on and off at will.

All computers are brand new and I did the installation. I think during the
installation I was offered a choice whether I wanted to have the logon with
a PW or not. On one of the computers I said: NO. Now I have an inconvenient
combination of machines that start up after just pressing a button and two
others that would wait until the PW is entered.

I want to get a handle on this. In fact I may need to change the policy on a
weekly basis. I've investigated every possible tab in Administrative
Tools-->Computer Management and other parts of the Control Panel even
remotely relevant to this problem and could not find anything that worked
for me. It appears once the initial conditions were set there is no way to
change this unless you uninstalled and reinstalled the OS?

In the past on my previous generation of machines I had a few weird
experiences when all of a sudden that policy would change spontaneously. My
network was poorly protected and frequently attacked by viruses and such. I
explained it away by this. There must be a way to control that logon window.

Thanks.

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.group_policy (More info?)

"Brian K. Sheperd" <brians.remove@remove.lesker.com> wrote in message
news:edRYI45MFHA.244@TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
> I am not sure if this is what you are asking, but if you go to the control
> pannel, users and passwords, then you can check or uncheck the Users must
> enter a username and password to use this computer.
>
> There are also registry hacks to automatically use a particular account to
> logon, but the username and password are stored as plain text in the
> registry.
>
> Brian

Thank you.

BTW, I've tried the control panel, users and passwords before but for some
reason it did not work. There is no option for automatic logon in there. At
least I could not find it.