An update: The emergency boot CD is an ISO that provides you with a convenient boot CD. The boot CD provides you with a boot into Linux with a simple way to reset your admin passwords. (site - ebcd.pcministry.com). This was useful to reset the passwords of NT images of defunct hardware that I was migrating to a virtual PC.
It is dangerous to allow a person to boot your PC with his floppy disk. This link discusses how you can get administrative access to a Windows XP machine by booting from a floppy disk.
The approach is rather ingenious. It edits the NT SAM database using an offline registry editor.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/nt.html. The utility chgntpw is excellent as an offline registry editing tool. A while back I was trying to find such a utility (see the BLOG on reinstalling Windows), but gave up. This seems promising...
This website also has approaches for admin access to Linux. A link from one of these pages discusses how to change Administrative passwords on Domain controllers - useful for administrators who install NT/XP half asleep ;-)
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/editor.html
RockXP3
While we are on security, be careful about RockXP3. One of its features is displaying passwords stored in Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and RAS. So if you save such passwords , they can be viewed with RockXP3.
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