Installed Vista Ultimate under VMware Fusion today (do I need it? no, but it's good to know a bit about it and for testing) - it nearly fills an 8 Gb disk image, and it gobbles up 1 Gb of RAM. I won't bore you with my opinion on those two facts...

VMware has a quick setup whereby it asks your name and a password and then lets the whole setup run with no further questions asked. After the whole install process, the system comes up logged in and ready to go - which is great.

Except that I did not enter a password, which leads to a system which does an auto-login with a password I do not know. It's definitely not the empty string. I don't even know who is to blame, VMware or Vista... After trying a few things and googling a bit, I was about to conclude that a full re-install would be my only option. No info on special boot keys to bypass/reset things, the built-in help says you need to know the admin password (or have a rescue disk, which... needs an admin password to be created). It all makes sense of course, but I wasn't getting anywhere with all this and left with a setup I couldn't administer.

But guess what: as admin, you can create a new user with admin rights, and it doesn't ask for your password! So I created a temporary user with full admin rights and with a known password, and switched to it. Then I reset the original admin's password - bingo. Did this after all the latest updates were applied, btw.

In other words: anyone can do anything on a machine running Vista if the current user is an administrator, without ever having to re-confirm the knowledge of that admin's password: simply create another admin and switch to it.

Pinch me. How many years has Vista been in development? How long has it been out as official release? On how many systems has it been installed?