Thanks for the responses. Decided to use Sysinternals, worked like a champ.
As to the registry, I feel relatively comfortable working in there but as this was a new computer, the suggestion was to back up the registry and no mention just a specific key or entry so thats what I did. Ended up...
Options listed for netplwiz to try are not present on my pc
I tried the registry edit at Enable or Disable Automatically Sign in Account at Startup in Windows 11 Tutorial and did not work
out of ideas.
additionally, i made a copy of the registry and get an error message trying to import it back