Adding user accounts in Win 7

[Tunnelcat]

On a Windows 7 Pro system, I'd like to add another user account on my husband's computer and then switch admin permissions over to the new user account and remove them from the original account. They'd both still be password controlled accounts. Is that possible? My husband uses that computer all the time and he's got all sorts of accessibility settings set that makes it difficult for me to use his computer. Specifically, since he's color blind, he's turned off all the colors and enlarged all the fonts in the OS and the browser. Since he only goes to sites that he knows, he can navigate just fine, but I surely can't anywhere else. So I need to create another account that I can use for maintenance and browsing that don't affect his accessibility settings. I'd also like to put Firefox in the new account but not the original account. Will Windows keep Firefox only in one account?

[Krom]

Yep, you can do most of that from the user accounts control panel and it is pretty straight forward.

As for firefox, the default browser is a per-user setting so different users can have different browsers as their default, but installing the browser is system wide and would be available in both accounts even if one chooses not to use it.

It may complicate your life a bit to have him using a standard user account, since anytime you want to do something (updating a program or something like that) which requires administrative access while logged in under his account you will have to enter in your username and password in the UAC prompts instead of just hitting "yes". You can have multiple accounts with administrative permissions if you want to avoid that.

[Tunnelcat]

Yeah, a standard account would not be his first choice. So my next question is can I have 2 admin accounts with the same password on the same computer? How about changing the name on the original admin account to something new?

[Krom]

Only rule is you can't have two accounts with the same name, everything else will work. Same password is fine.

[Tunnelcat]

Thanks Krom.

[Tunnelcat]

Uh oh. Now I'm getting this event long error every time the computer boots or I log on or off and switch users. I already have IVp6 disabled on the network adapter. The only other thing I've found in my searching is to rename a file in %windows%/Panther/setup.etl to setup.old and reboot to let Windows recreate it. Sound like a fix to you Krom?

ERROR EVENT 2 Kernal-EventTracing

Circular Kernal Context Logger error 0X0000035

[Krom]

Sounds like a fix that probably works by disabling some related logging component or something like that so the error no longer triggers even if the underlying issue isn't actually resolved.

[Tunnelcat]

Sounds like a fix that probably works by disabling some related logging component or something like that so the error no longer triggers even if the underlying issue isn't actually resolved.

Actually, I'm not sure what it does, other than force Windows to recreate the file. After reading more online, it's not a guaranteed fix either. People are now just hacking since Microsoft has had no solution forthcoming in all the years since they launched Win 7 and judging from all the posts on Microsoft's sites, is a very common problem. A lot of the people complaining about this error also have at least 2 accounts and that about 12 or so instances of this error get thrown in the Event Log every time they boot their system or log off and on while switching accounts, as it does in my case. There were also mentions about printer driver issues, SID conflicts and something with Homegroups, so I'm going to have to look into those settings. The only other "solution" was to disable the Kernal Context Logger in computer management, which frankly seems like a hack fix.

[Tunnelcat]

Fixed it. I removed all our computers from the Homegroup. Never used it anyway since there's a common NAS on our LAN. Good riddance since the same error started to show up on ALL the other computers on the Homegroup as well.