> for instance in windows xp, you can press ctrl+alt+del twice, and it will allow you to manually type in a username/password.

You can do that in Mac OS X by pressing an up/down arrow key, and then press Shift-Option-Return.

To set it permanently, you choose Apple->System Preferences->Accounts. Under Login Options, select "Display Login Items as: Name and Password" instead of "List of users".

I still want the list of users, I just don't want specific accounts to be visible on that list. I hope that makes more sense


thanks!

I don't think that's possible. The only way to keep specific users from showing up in the list is to hide them all, like I suggested in my previous post.

actually it is possible. Yes. You can hide as many as user account you wish. To hide the user account from the Login Window, first open the System Preferences and then click on Accounts pane. Then, search for the name of the user account which you want to hide and then open the Terminal window from /Applications/Utilities/. Then, run the below command in it:

Code:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow HiddenUsersList -array-add <user_account1> <user_account2> <user_account3> <user_account4>
Where "<user_account1> <user_account2> <user_account3> <user_account4>" are the user account names which you want to hide. You can hide as many as you wish. Just use the space between each user account name.

Once you hit Enter, the user account(s) will be hidden. To experience the changes, log out the system and in the login window the user account which you have hidden will be invisible. Apart from this, you see one additional option called “Others”. Others is used to access the hidden user accounts.

To make visible or unhidden the user account, just run the below command:

Code:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow HiddenUsersList -array-add
If you won’t specify the user account names, then the hidden users list will become empty. Then, log out from the system and in the login window, you will see the user accounts which you made unhidden.