Solved Disabling signin on startup screen

New install of Win 11 Pro 24H2 yesterday. The option box to bypass signin on startup seems to no longer exist. On the Accounts>Sign-in Options page, there are just a list of ways to sign in. I'm using a PIN right now. If I click Remove on it, does that eliminate it generally or only on computer startup. The page is confusing.

Hello,

You can use option 1 in the tutorial below to setup netplwiz to automatically sign in to your account at startup.

Doesn't work -- and worse. Now I get the following message: "We are unable to connect right now. Please check your network and try again later." I click OK and enter a password and in I go. Something else must be going on.

The worse: There are now two listings of my name down on the lower left of the start screen after clicking OK. This is exactly what happened earlier this week after I did an in-place upgrade from Win 10. The suggested fixes here led to Windows fatally crashing and having to do a direct install (there are three threads about what happened in the course of it).

Not sure what to make of it all.

Usually when you see two instances of your account at sign in after using netplwiz, it's from either changing the account's password or computer name afterwards.

Checking the box in netplwiz will stop this.

I did change the password several weeks ago on getting a new laptop, but that one hasn't been recognized recently. So I've been using the previous one lately.

Checking the netplwiz box may stop the double names, but leaves signin at boot. Am I stuck, or is there something else going on here?

You could try switching to a local account then switching back to a Microsoft account afterwards to see if it may toggle it to recognize the new password.

If it does, then you can setup netplwiz again.

I ended up doing a repair install and that solved it the startup problem I posed here, as well stopping the black desktop icons after restarts (fingers crossed). The only thing remaining, and the reason for the repair, is that Notifications (in Settings) doesn't show a list of apps, which it's supposed to, Whether or not that would turn off notifications and sound for my email program (Sylpheed) thus remains up in the air, although an MS customer support rep (chat) thought it would, after first saying that this is a known Win 11 issue where some apps, especially older or non-UWP (Universal Windows Platform) ones, do not register themselves properly with Windows' notification system.

@Brink, while I'm summarizing here, I had trouble with your "Rebuild the Icon Cache in Windows 11" page. Some of it seemed out of date -- it is four years old -- the batch file kept trying to save as an html file here, and some of the command prompt strings in Option 3 returned error messages. In the end, I took the text for the batch file you thankfully supplied and created my own that worked temporarily at least, until what was creating the black desktop icons was solved with a proper repair install (shutting down MBAM first).

Great news. I'm glad you got it sorted out.