I had a big scare today. I almost lost everything on my laptop. What kills me is that it was a dumb mistake. I was moving my laptop out of our corporate domain onto a local workgroup, which worked great. I forgot to create a new account on the machine and I essentially locked myself out of my system. With some help from a guy at work, I was able to download a linux CD image, boot the sytsem up and reset my admin password on the system. From there, I was able to boot up, create a new account and migrate my account using this article. Phew.