Has anyone used Sala's password renewal utility successfully on a computer that has Windows XP SP2 installed on it? I cannot seem to get it to work using any of the functions it provides. And I thought that maybe because my PE CD was based on SP1 was the cause of the issue. Not so, as an SP2 PE CD did not make any difference in the utility's abilities with regard to SP2.

i just did some testing with the latest version of sala pwrenew and BartPE build from SP2.

On the host machine running XPSP2 i could create a new admin account and change the password of an existent admin account.
After that i logged in to both accounts.

i don't think that SP2 has changed anything about the account management so it should work.

Okay, making a little headway here. I've looked at the way the utility works. It installs a service in the host machine's registry that is launched nearly the same time the logon screen appears. For some reason, the utility is installing the service on one of my computers in the wrong part of the registry. And so when Windows boots up, it never starts the service and never makes the account/password changes. Now to figure out why it is doing this.

EDIT: Okay, I figured it out. The utility is installing the service to HKLM\Services\CurrentControlSet001 which you would think would be translated when booting the host as HKLM\Services\CurrentControlSet. However, it seems that ControlSet002 is my actual CurrentControlSet when booting off of the hard drive. It looks like you can figure out which ControlSet00x is the CurrentControlSet by seeing if HKLM\Services\ControlSet00x\Control with value "SystemBootDevice" exists.

EDIT: I was premature in saying that the existence of SystemBootDevice designates the CurrentControlSet. So does anyone know how to figure out which controlset00x translates to currentcontrolset?

EDIT: Okay, last edit... I promise. CurrentControl00x is designated as CurrentControlSet according to data value of HKLM\System\Select "Current".

tnx for your help!
i have been little busy lately. but i think can fix this about a week or so.
But there is another problem with sp2 pc's. when you try to load up remote (offline) hive pe pumps out error and it says that registry is recovered from backup sucessfuly (or somethink like that). I belive this get fix if you use sp2 based pe.

Now it is done!
Download:
http://www.sala.pri.ee/#pass

* CurrentSet fix (now it is more sp2 compatible!?)
* "Null" password support for Create new Administrator user

Thanks, sala!

Still RC2 not the newer one ;-(