there are plenty of windows command line password crackers out there..

the last i remember best are crack arj and crack pwl depending on your version
of windows you should be able to crack it quick.. watch out though.. you can
get some nasty bugs from some of those websites claiming to have hack and
crack downloads.. you may be able to extract the utility and run it from a cd
or the a:\ drive if its small eneough.

good luck & GOOGLE IT

Are your kids still able to change it every day? Or are you just saying they changed it and changed it and then forgot the last thing they changed it to? And this is Windows but somehow the password is in DOS mode? That sounds weird.

You can always boot off your CD or floppy drive, reformat and start over, of course. A repair shop can save all the data off the drive by mounting the drive in another computer temporarily and backing it up.

On XP, you can have multiple 'accounts' on the machine, so your kids can have one and you can have another; that way they can lock themselves out but not lock YOU out.

Good luck!

that is the question that I have, ie, my daughter set up an account and set up a password without telling us. how do we either find the password or by-pass to get back control of our computer?

Many different ways of doing it. You can, for example, reformat the hard drive, although that would kind of suck if you had important data on there.

There are lots of password retrieval tools out there. Loginrecovery can create a boot floppy you can use to recover it. (I'm assuming you have Windows XP/NT/2000. If it's earlier than that, you might need something different.)

You can use this... http://home.eunet.no/%7Epnordahl/ntpasswd/