Tuesday, 4 February 2020

Why is the guest account missing/broken in Windows 10?

In older versions of Windows and even in Windows 10 previews you could enable the built-in guest account in control panel



Control Panel\User Accounts\User Accounts\Manage Accounts



available guest account in older Windows versions


In Windows 10, the Guest entry is missing.


Using Computer Management or net user you can still enable the guest account, but even then it doesn't show up on the logon screen.


In the Local Security Policy secpol.msc:



Local Policies - User Rights Assignment - Deny log on locally



we can see guest listed, this wasn't the case in older versions of Windows.


After removing guest from that policy, it is listed on the logon screen and we can using it to log on.


However, the whole Explorer shell is crashing and restarting constantly. The desktop is blinking and you can't click anything.


So the guest account is totally broken.


There is a question on answers.microsoft.com about this showing that some code was quickly added to the control panel to not show the guest account. So Microsoft does know about the problem.


While I don't really expect anybody to know what they've done to break this, at least this explains why the guest account is currently not listed.

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