Well, yesterday was a great day... NOT! Somehow, and I've yet been able to figure out why, my password got reset. Now I figure it's one of four scenerios:

A) A little kid somehow changed the password by pounding on my keyboard B) One of our neighbors has been sitting cracking our WPA passkey the last month (and I think that all of our neighbors have WiFi) C) Some Uber h4x0r who's peed off at me snuck in via the internet and changed it hoping to make my life miserable D) My SAM file got corrupted

D is the most likely scenerio, but you can't discount any of the others. Anyhoo, I spent most of yesterday figuring out how to undo it without reinstalling Windows. My first thought was to try the Linux distro austrumi which has a utility called nt_pass (only in version 0.9.2, btw). Well, that didn't want to work because, gosh, my SAM file is read-only. Well what jerk wrote that program? :-P

So, I went and did some more searching and came across a little hole in the Windows Istaller. Here's how it works:

A) You'll need a Windows XP/2003 CD (any flavor: plain, SP1 or SP2) that's bootable (I 'spect most have this kind) B) Boot with that and get to the point where you can repair a Windows install (Enter, Enter, F8, R I believe is the key sequence) C) Just go along with that. Your computer will reboot and start the second half of the install. D) Be paying atention to the progress bar in the lower left of the screen. When I says "Install Devices" hit F10. You'll be greeted by a command prompt which will allow you to do darn near anything you want. E) In this particular case run the command "control userpasswords2" and a friendly box will come up where you can reset passwords, add users, etc. F) Once you've done whatever it is you're going to do let Windows finish installing or you'll lose everything you just did.

Needless to say that I created myself a new user account so I could leave the Aministrator one alone ('tis one of the drawbacks to 2K3. You have to go using the command prompt just to get to a place to add a user :-P). But now I'm back in business and everything works great. I hope somebody out there finds that useful because it sure was to me.