I finally decided to set a Windows password on my new machine, never having used a password before but also never being at university before. So all is going well, and I set it to one of my most commonly used passwords so I won’t forget it. I lock the computer, then type in my password just to make sure it’s working. It says wrong password. OK, I might’ve mistyped it. I try again, with the same result.

End result, I try the actual password several times, various mistypings of it, some of my other common passwords, and no password whatsoever, and none of them work. I’ve tried rebooting, but to no avail. Safe mode also didn’t help. I only have one partition on the drive, so I can’t simply install Vista Home Premium again on a different partition and move all my files off the drive from there. All I can figure is I either mistyped my password twice in a row on the enter/confirm password dialogue for User Accounts, or Windows corrupted the password.

So does anyone have experience with recovering passwords in this situation? Google has turned up a couple possibilities, but until I buy a few CDs I can’t test them. Unless I can turn my USB drive into a boot USB - it’s a Kingston Data Traveler, USB 2.0 and 2 GB. I don’t necessarily need a quick recovery, but I don’t want to overwrite my files.