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I looked and found a similar question here, I think, but mine is a little more general. Here is the situation:

I installed a program on a workstation that functions as a server for our tiny office. In order for this program to automate a procedure that fetches data from a big company's server and puts it on the HDD of this workstation I had to give it the Windows user name and password. I assumed this was the same credentials used to log in to Windows so let's say the credentials are (I'm formatting the user name similarly):

User: Dogs & Alfred
Pass: xxyyzz

It gave me an error stating that the user name and password did not match what Windows said they were. I was super confused and on hold with an IT guy puzzling over it for about 20 mins before he came back and asked me to go into Task Manager and look at the ID in the Users tab. What do you know, it's just "Alfred". So I put in Alfred and it worked.

As stated in the title, why are the two different? I don't recall having the option to type in any other name in the User Account creation process in Windows other than just the user account name. I should note that this is the only account on the computer, it has admin privileges (I know, bad), and it was set up before I started working here but from what I understand it was created at the one and only time Windows 7 was installed and the user name has not been changed since.

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Sounds like you tried to use the "FullName" and not the "Name". To see what I'm talking about run the following code in powershell.

Get-WmiObject win32_UserAccount

User ID's are objects, and like any object (physical or virtual) they have properties. Your "FullName" and your "Name" are just properties of the object that is your user id. However the computer values your "Name" over your "FullName" to qualify your identity.

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  • I see what you mean. I installed Powershell and ran the command on my workstation; the FullName is "DogeSoCoin" but the Name is "Jordan". Interesting.
    – Delaric
    Apr 29, 2014 at 20:48
  • Well, two or more accounts can have the same "FullName" -like "John Smith" for example. However, they cannot have an identical "Name". To differentiate themselves to an identity vault they'd Likely be named jsmith and jsmith2 or something similar.
    – Colyn1337
    Apr 30, 2014 at 12:05

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