Windows Registry is Evil

I have heard from colleagues who worked in end user support, that Windows registry was a source for many problems. But this one that just bit me int he rear is evil.

I have an old Asus EeePC running Windows XP. It was setup initially as a box to automatically logon. I wanted to give it to my kid to carry around. So I needed to turn off the auto logon. Googling "Windows XP auto logon", I found this Microsoft article titled "How to turn on automatic logon in Windows XP". So I went ahead and found the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon". I then removed the DefaultUserName entry, assuming that would be enough to disable auto logon.

Upon reboot, however, Windows popped up an error message which is quickly covered with the Windows startup screen. It seemed to just hang there. The mouse cursor moved, but Ctrl-Alt-Del did not do anything. I rebooted it a couple of times by pressing on the power button. I got distracted for a while and come back to find Windows actually timed out from whatever it was doing.

One wouldn't have thought Windows would behave like that with removing one single value from the registry. But I guess this just shows that I have not messed around in the Windows registry enough.

I ended up downloading the Microsoft Fixit program in the How to page linked above. That did work to turn off auto logon for me. Otherwise, I guess I would have to break out my Windows XP CD, go into recovery console mode, find a registry backup and restore it. That would have been the last straw to break it for me to replace this Windows installation with Linux.