xp assistance

gang,

first time poster here, but long-time visitor/user. I've come here before to troubleshoot my own bugs, most of them successfully thanks to help from all at Major Geeks. Have a real dilemma this time though and in need of some help.

the black screen of death appears on start-up for a friends computer, so I've offered to help. I can get around this by starting in safe mode F8 but I'm then presented with the users log-in screen. The passwords they gave me for their profiles aren't working - I get the error message "Unable to log you in because your account has been locked out, please contact your administrator"

That sucks. How can I get in to troubleshoot??? How can I bypass the log-in??? It's an IBM Thinkpad build T21 running Windows XP.

Please help and thanks in advance

 

tried with the user ID they have set-up on XP start-up and the password they gave me. no luck. so how to get around that just to troubleshoot?