Password Protection, XP or VISTA ???

I'm presently concerned with password protection for users of XP or Vista systems...
Is there a way to bypass the authorized user passwords and get into the system if you don't know the password? Or are you just SOL and required to reformat the drive and reload an operating system?

If you do a search for lost XP password you will find all kinds of hits to help you find it. I would help you, but that type of stuff is blocked here at work. I had to do this a few years for a friend that lost their XP password. IIRC, I found something that required you to build a CD that booted into Linux and then it reset it or something like that. Didn't take me long to do, but that was a few years ago.

Users cannot bypass using a password to get into the systems.

If you are not already in that situation you could create a backup account.

If you google mark minsky power tools I bet you find a lot of goodies. When we had to recover a system that we did not have the admin password on Marks' tools worked like a charm. They were not free though.

This is something similar to what I used years ago - but I don't believe this was exactly it and I've never used this method so use at your own risk:

http://www.windows-help-central.com/lost-xp-password.html

This one looks familiar, it may be what I used, but can't swear to it:

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html