When logging into a Windows 98-based machine by hitting Esc to bypass the password prompt, which user account is used?

Question

It's been a while now, but when Windows 98 was stil a thing I can vividly remember that when the login screen appeared with the password prompt, I was simply able to hit the esc key on my keyboard to bypass this which then allowed me into Windows. I unfortunatley don't have a machine running 98 that I can test with, but just out of interest - when the above method is used to log into a machine, which account would then be used if multiple existed on the system?

Answer 1

To start with, Windows 95/98 did not have user accounts in the same way that Windows NT and Unix systems do. The login facility was there primarily for networking and had only minimal impact on local processes – you could optionally have separate desktop settings, but no matter what you "logged in" as, your programs would always run with the same unlimited rights. It was not a multi-user OS.

The original purpose of this login prompt in Windows 3.11 was just to record your network credentials, so that you could access network-shared folders or printers (if they were served by NT or NetWare). Later, Windows 95 added the optional ability to load different user settings depending on the username; you could have a separate "My Documents" folder, a separate HKCU registry with your own desktop wallpaper; but it still remained a fundamentally one-user system (unlike NT).

So if the user profile feature was enabled, clicking "Cancel" would just continue using the system default profile that was already loaded at that point, just as if profiles hadn't been enabled. (For an NT analogy, you could kind of say that you were logged in as the 'SYSTEM' user.)

And if you didn't have per-user profiles, then there was no real difference between clicking "OK" vs clicking "Cancel" – in fact, the dialog would probably be titled "Network Logon" rather than "Windows Logon".

That being said I faintly remember that there was a registry knob to enforce logins and disable use of the 'Cancel' button – Windows 98 did have an early form of Roaming Profiles and even Group Policy – so you could actually have some protection from unauthorized users (if you also prevented boot from floppy disk).