SIGH

I'm fairly decent with computers, but retarded in terms of networking. A friend was trying to help me set up a small workgroup network of 3 computers.

Now, I was allowed to keep my computer when I left my last job, but since then, we are not on the best of terms - the IT dept has not responded to any of my phone/emails asking for help.

Here are the steps of everything we did:
1) we disabled the wireless network
2) under tcp/ip LAN settings, we changed the static ip address
3) we changed the selection from domain (the old work's network) to workgroup
4) we were then prompted to restart the computer.

When we did, my user name was still in the box, but it would not recognize the log-in/password combo. There were no other options available, such as logging in to a specific network or to the computer itself. We tried to reboot into safe mode - same problem.

If I cannot get help from the old network administrator, is there any other option? Or do I now have a brick?

this is a pretty urgent problem, so any help anyone could offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

There's always a local admin account, which you'd have to crack... or what you can do is boot off the cdrom and open the command prompt mode and delete the ntuser.dat file under the local administrator account's profile directory (usually c:\documents and settings\administrator\ntuser.dat), which will completely reset the local admin account including the password.

You've lost your user settings though... you can still manually copy your documents from that user directory into the new one, but settings will be gone.