Interesting Facts

If you share your Windows XP.Professional system with many other users, you have no doubt experienced how pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del results in the name of the last user logged on to be displayed automatically in the username portion of the logon box. While this is great if you were the last one to log on, it can be frustrating if you weren’t. More often than not, users won’t even bother looking at the username portion of the box and just type their password, resulting in a failed logon.

To address this issue, you may want to consider disabling the automatic display of the last user’s name in the logon dialog box. This is accomplished via a Registry edit. To ensure that the user portion of the logon box remains unpopulated, follow these steps:

1. Click Start > Run. Type Regedit.exe in the Open text box and click OK.
2. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
3. Right click in the right-hand side of the screen and select New > DWORD value. Name the value DontDisplayLastUserName.
4. Double-click DontDisplayLastUserName and set its value to 1.

You can subsequently re-enable the setting by changing its value to 0 if need be. Close the Registry Editor and reboot to check your new logon settings.