Hide and Unhide A User’s Login

by David | Nov 22, 2020 | Help Desk, Information Technology, PowerShell

Do you have an admin account that needs to be hidden? Setting up this account among 2000 machines at different sites and different clients? Sounds like a nightmare right? Well, you can easily hide a user’s account from the login. This is done through the registry.

HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList

Inside here, we create a Dword with the username that we want to hide from the start menu and set it to 0 to hide the user and 1 to make it visible. So the code is a single liner. We create the Userlist, if it doesn’t exist, and make the new item property.

This code will make the user visable.

New-Item 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList' -Force | New-ItemProperty -Name $Param1 -Value 1 -PropertyType DWord -Force

This code will make the user hidden.

New-Item 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList' -Force | New-ItemProperty -Name $Param1 -Value 0 -PropertyType DWord -Force

Make sure to replace the Param1 with the username accordingly. After that you will need to reboot and should be good to go.