Windows has me locked out & Asking for password?

:(

Well here is the story.

I did have a PW set to get into my desktop and decided to change that to not needing a PW as there is not a soul

in my house that would touch my computer. I followed the instructions and everything went fine. Today i rebooted and it asked for a PW

so since it would not let me in I put in the old PW---it rejected it. I rebooted several times---same problem, I did see the welcome screen come up for a second on the last stab at it but it quickly reverted to wrong pw or user. Looking at help it says the only way to get in is

to restore the entire thing----back to factory---please tell me there is another way, I had trouble getting the thing to back up my files so I have some things on therfe that I will lose forever.

OS= Vista

HP desktop with lots of hard disk and memory

Anyone have any ideas I can try?

Thank you!!!

Is this what you did Joanie?

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windowsvista...stapassword.htm

Rorschach112 had a recommendation for fixing a password here:

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=21068&st=0

Does that apply? Hope so, it looks easy, but chkdsk might take a looooong time. :)

On the off chance that you accidentally created a new password, you might try http://pcsupport.about.com/.../passrecovery.htm

you may also need to run malwarebytes,,looks like somebody tried to get in..and antivirus of course.