I am running Win 98 and Outlook Express on Pentium II and when I go through the ‘Start’ menu to ‘Log Off…’ I am asked if I am sure I want to log off. I confirm yes and am then asked to identify myself to Windows and enter my password (if I want to) with the promise that if I do not (enter a password) I won’t get this message again. I don’t, but still get the message every time. Once out of spite I entered my password was told it is incorrect!

There is actually nothing wrong with your computer. When you log off Windows this means that you are closing down the current user who is logged in. When you do this, the ‘Identify to Windows’ dialog has to come up even if it has promised not too because if it doesn’t then there is really no point in having the ‘Log off…’ option in the ‘Start’ menu. If it were possible to log off without the dialog box, then the computer would just load back into Windows with the default user which would totally defeat the point of logging off. On the other hand, if your problem is that this box comes up each time you start Windows and you cannot get rid of it (which many users experience) then the way to get around it is to get a utility called TweakAll (www.abtons-shed.com), which is a more feature rich version of TweakUI which was made by Microsoft, and this has the option to automatically log into your computer for you during startup. This can automate your logging into your computer so you don’t need to manually do anything when the ‘Identify to Windows’ box appears. Before you do let this program automatically login to Windows for you, you will need to create a user with a password. This can be done from ‘Users’ in the Windows ‘Control Panel’. This is very straight forward and you will just have to follow the wizard interface. Do not make your password the same as any other important and secret passwords that you may have, because anyone can view the password which you use to automatically log into Windows (ie. the password for your user) if they look in the Windows System Registry.