Admin Password / Logon Issue

[Aetre]

My girlfriend has Windows XP Home and accidentally locked herself out of her own profile. She was trying to password-protect just a folder, but she ended up locking out the administrator.

Furthermore, she knows what the password was, but it's not working; Windows thinks about the word for a minute, but then it gives an error screen. Any entry that is not the password gets an immediate error, no waiting involved.

Is there any good, safe way she can hack into her own system here, or any way to fix this problem?

[Mog]

So what is going on here, is she locked out of windows altogether? When you boot up the computer does it take you to a login screen?

Try hitting ctrl-alt-del twice and typing in "administrator" with no password, this'll get you on if she isn't using and didn't get rid of the admin account, but that's unlikely.

It's strange that it gives you an error with the correct password, I've never seen that happen before. I'm trying to fathom how she could've possibly done this.

[Aetre]

Amy responds:

"With Windows not accepting the password it's hard to tell if it's the correct password or if something happened with a caps lock or typo that I've been unable to repeat. I find it odd though that the one password it has to think about for awhile before giving me the error and all of the other responses are immediate. So overall, I'm just treating this as a "forgotten" password problem. As for being locked out, not locked out completely. I can get into a guest account. I've been unable to repair from the disk to reset the passwords, and unable to set up a second administrator account to unset the password on the first profile login. And since there's already an administrator account just logging in as "adminstrator" no password also hasn't worked."

Also, she's unable to start in safe mode. No idea why.