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Changing Forgotten Screen Saver Password

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by your mom 2.0 1 view

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I have a use who assigned a screensaver password to her Win98 PC a year or so ago, forgot it, and now wants to use her screen saver password again.

When we try to change her password thru Display Properties->Screen Saver-> Change, we're prompted to enter the old password, and we don't know what that is. It will not allow us to set a new one without the old one typed in first...

I've tried deleting the "ScreenSaveUsePassword" key in regedit (as well as just changing the value to 0 instead of 1), removing all of the .scr files, uninstalling and reinstalling all screen savers thru Add / Remove Programs, deleting all .pwl files, and a couple of other suggestions from www.computing.net.

How can I remove her old password so I can lether put a new one in?

If anyone has the solution for this, reply to this posting or email me at jsy4774@hotmail.com, please.

Thanks!

12 replies

by syscokid

I think the key you want is

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\
ScreenSave_Data.

Change it to 00.

Also check in the HKEY_USER hive for a similar setting.

by your mom 2.0

Forgot to mention I've tried that too, and that didn't solve the problem. I scanned the reg for everything with "screen" in it. If it looked appropriate, I'd change the value from 1 to 0 or just delete the key altogether.

Maybe I missed something...seems like this fix should be in the registry somewhere...

Thanks.

by hjs

Much easier then you think. Do a search for *.pwl files and delete them. That's all.

by 1stladytech

As the previos user stated, deleting the *.pwl files (usually found in the windows directory) will resolve the problem but it will also delete any saved passwords in the system, including log in. You may want to save them with a different extensionso that you may go back to them if needed.

Vickie

by your mom 2.0

As I previously stated, I had already deleted all of the .pwl's and that didn't do the trick (actually the first thing I tried after trying to guess what her passwd was).

Tweakui didn't show anything about repairing retrieving screen saver passwords.

I believe too many people are under the impression I'm talking about a logon password, and that's not the case. Deleting the .pwl will fix that prolem, not screensavers.

And there was no mention of a PWProtected line in control.ini, butthanks for the suggestion.

Maybe something's really corrupt on this machine...

by syscokid

I just re-read your response to my 1st answer. You need to change the value to 00, not 0. A single 0 doesn't do the trick.

Alternately, goto desktop properties, screensaver. Uncheck "password protected" and click apply. Then check "password protected" again, and click apply. Now click the Change button. It should allow you to proceed with asking for the old password.

by your mom 2.0

Out of the blue, the user remembered her password, so I guess this isn't the priority it once was.

Still curious as to what the solution is, but this particular user's PC isn't the best test subject: It started as an upgrade from 98 to 2k, but2k couldn't run some job-critical legacy apps so it went back to 98...I was in a bind and couldn't backup her data to another machine or removable media so I had to use a very unorthodox method for removing 2000 and installing 98 without formatting and losing gb's of critical data. Because of the workaround there's probably some OS corruption...

Regarding that reg key: it'll allow "00" but not "0" for the value. "0" isn't even an option.

The one thing mentioned here that I didn't try was the checking and unchecking the box & clicking "Apply" thing. It may or may not work, but you get the points because you made the effort to post another solution when you saw that the problem wasn't resolved yet, and I believe that sticking with a problem until it is solved is something that should be encouraged and rewarded.

Thanks to everyone for your assistance in this matter.

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