Background: As part an automated testing suite I am building, I need to set up Autologon on my virtual machines 'on demand'. By on demand, I mean that I don't want to necessarily pre-configure my VM or any snapshot to have Autologon set up already, for security reasons and also a huge business case.

My solution so far: I'm copying a script to the guest machine and then using Sysinternals PsExec to execute it. The script is:

reg add "hklm\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon" /f /v DefaultUserName /t REG_SZ /d myusername
reg add "hklm\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon" /f /v DefaultPassword /t REG_SZ /d myfakepassword
reg add "hklm\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon" /f /v DefaultDomainName /t REG_SZ /d mydomain
reg add "hklm\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon" /f /v ForceAutoLogon /t REG_SZ /d 1
reg add "hklm\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon" /f /v AutoAdminLogon /t REG_SZ /d 1
reg add "hklm\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\AutoLogonChecked" /f /ve /d 1

Note: I don't believe AutoLogonChecked is required for machines post Windows 2000 but I'm doing it just in case for now. Maybe ForceAutoLogon isn't either, not sure yet.

The Problem: I see PsExec executes this properly and all the values are in the registry, however when I restart the machine, the user isn't automatically logged on...When I run this a second time then restart the machine, the user is finally logged on.

A diff between the registry states shows that the first time I run this, it is missing both the "1" for AutoAdminLogon, and also the DefaultPassword key. The second time I execute it, these values are correctly intact as I intended.

So, what is going on here? Is this expected? This post claims in the end that it really all just works (the problem was that a logoff script was setting off the values). Doesn't seem to work for me however.