So this time they weren’t hidden ’cause they weren’t in the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList
But they didn’t show up in the Accounts Control Panel or in Run > control userpasswords2.
But they do show up when you run the command:
net user
aaand each account is active.. BUT they had no groups assigned to them and since it was XP Home Edition we didn’t have access to the groups snap in.
So, thanks to Google we found the proper syntax for adding a user (“username”) to a group (“Administrators”) with the net command:
net localgroup Administrators username /add
Sources:
By the way, if the username has any spaces in it, it must be inside quotations for this to work.