The issue came up today when a coworker told about his Windows 2000 machine he had at home that he had forgotten the password for, now for corporate use we have the Microsoft ERD commander cd (previously Winternals) which works perfectly..  but that is for corporate use (SA license required)..

Anyhow, I remembered there was some strange utility that could do the same thing, it took a little googeling but I quickly found it it’s;
http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

Free and all 🙂

Another approach would be, find KonBoot (the first version was free, but it has now gone commercial) it may be a bit hard to find the free version but it is out there and works..  Boot with KonBoot, bypass windows logon (password can be bypassed by leaving the field blank), now create a new admin account (eg call it “admin”)- set password – make this new user member of the local administrators group.  Now boot without KonBoot and login with this new account, you can now change the password for the real administrator account…  (it may also be possible to change the password for the administrator account while booted via KonBoot, but I am not 100% on that)..

I managed to find KonBoot here; http://www.darknet.org.uk/2009/06/kon-boot-reset-windows-linux-passwords/ 

Problemo solved 🙂