by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/06/03 14:01 +00:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/06/03/10171014.aspx
Conceptually, it is a bit like locking yourself out of your car (by locking it up with the keys inside).
But it is easy to do it -- change your password and include characters in the password that are not included on the keyboards you have for your logon screen.
See Updating the keyboard list in the logon dialog for more on how to update the keyboard list of the logon screen -- how to get caught short here with a password containing letters nor on any of those keyboards is left as an exercise for the absent-minded!
This problem is also caused by a scenario that I found common personally when the first internal betas of MSKLC became available, actually.
It seems people would create keyboards that did not contain all of the letters in the password they had.
And this was back in the XP days where you might already be in session 0,and that keyboard change might be followed by being unable to unlock the computer or login after a reboot.
This ended up becoming quite an interesting "support" issue for those early MSKLC builds!
And now for today's interesting problem for all you readers....
Think of it as a Microsoft interview question that I would never ask, except maybe if it was for a test position and I really wanted to test the ability to think outside the logon box. :-)
The question: how would you get them back into their machine.
Scoring will be as follows:
Some time next week I'll do the roundup with my scoring decisions (which are are arbitrary and final!) and any interesting methods that are missed....
Ready? Set? Go!