You would think that doing something to recover a password or clear a password would be simple. Reading through all the various offerings and comments accross the web it appears that it is not simple and certainly not cheap!

This open source linux based solution manages to combine free and easy.

PC Login Now is available from SourceForge

It’s an iso CD image that you burn to a CD.  Boot the offending computer with this CD and it loads a Linux shell with the PC Login Now application.

Select the operating system that you want to access – generally you will have only one – and click on Next. Select the user that you want to access and check the Password is Empty (i.e. blank) option box and click on Next. You can then select another user or reboot the computer.

Under Windows XP (although I expect this on other Windows versions as well) you will get a prompt to scan your hard disk. I am sure this is a side effect of making the back end system change and not an issue. Let the scan run and then access your Windows system using the local user account with a blank password.