When starting my Windows 98 computer, a message appears saying: ‘Enter your network password for Microsoft networking’. I click the ‘Cancel’ button and the computer finishes loading. Is there a way to stop this box from coming up?

This is quite a common problem and there are a few procedures you can try. After attempting each procedure, restart the computer to see if the problem has been solved. Firstly, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Settings’ > ‘Control Panel’. Open the ‘Network’ control panel and click the ‘Configuration’ tab. Change the ‘Primary Network Logon’ setting to ‘Windows Logon’. Click OK and restart the computer. Be aware, this procedure will not work if you initially configured a password for your username. In this case, open the ‘Passwords’ control panel and make your password blank. Then, make sure ‘Windows Logon’ is selected as the network logon and restart the computer. Should the problem continue, there is an article on Microsoft Knowledge Base which expands on the previous procedure and provides some more steps. This article is available at support.microsoft.com/kb/152104.

As a last resort to fix the problem, we can configure Windows 98 to automatically logon at startup, which should not require user intervention in the logon process (which will bypass the logon screen). Go to: www.microsoft.com/ntworkstation/downloads/powertoys/networking/nttweakui.asp
and download then install the TweakUI utility. Once installed, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Settings’ > ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘TweakUI’ control panel. Click the ‘Network’ tab and tick ‘Log on automatically at system startup’. You will need to type in your Windows username (if you click the ‘Start’ menu, your username will be listed after the ‘Log off’ text) and password (which may be blank, if you did the previous procedure). Click OK and restart the computer.