Windows 7: Deleting Excess "User" Accounts

One day, while wandering through the forest of drive C, I came upon C:\Users, where I beheld more users than I had anticipated. We had Administrator, All Users, Default, Default User, Public, Ray, and Ray Woodcock.  Who were all these people?  And did I want to be associated with them?

Most of these weren't listed in Control Panel > User Accounts > Manage another account.  There, I saw only Ray and Guest.  (I had set myself to be Administrator.)  Guest wasn't listed in C:\Users, so there seemed to be some slippage here. Maybe Guest didn't actually exist yet; the button was there just so I could add a guest account when needed.  So were all these Users in C:\Users real?  Could I delete any of them?

This appeared not to be exactly the same as deleting an account that would appear in User Accounts.  Here in C:\Users, I was dealing with folders that looked like they were tied in with other things.  In other words, it seemed that it could be a bad idea to delete the wrong account.  I ran a search, seeking guidance, but even Microsoft seemed pretty blasé about the prospect:  "If you have a user account on your computer that is not being used, you can permanently remove it by deleting it."  Period.  Just do it.  There were different steps, they said, according to whether the computer was on a workgroup or a domain.  Their procedure for making that determination was (in my translation) to go to Start > Run > SystemPropertiesAdvanced.exe > Computer Name tab.  (Soon, I would run into stories of grief from those who had actually proceeded to wipe out their C:\Users subfolders willy-nilly.)

Back in C:\Users, I went into the Administrator folder.  The only thing there was a subfolder called Application Data\ImgBurn\Log Files.  Well.  Could I set ImgBurn to put its log files somewhere else?  It seemed I could.  The relevant settings were in ImgBurn > Tools > Settings > File Locations tab.  There were actually four different folders that I needed to create elsewhere, in order to completely eliminate ImgBurn's need for C:\Users\Administrator.  I saved the ImgBurn Settings.ini file so that I wouldn't have to do this again after some future installation.  Then I deleted that folder.

Next, I went into C:\Users\Ray Woodcock.  This one had evidently been created by Microsoft Office, for the use of Outlook.  But I wasn't using Outlook.  So I just deleted C:\Users\Ray Woodcock.

The list was getting shorter, but now the sledding was tougher.  I wasn't going to delete the Ray account.  Two of the four others -- All Users and Default User -- had padlock icons, suggesting that Windows would rather keep them.  All four also had lots of subfolders.  It appeared they might not meet the Microsoft qualification:  IF the account is not being used.  These accounts were not being used by me, directly.  But it appeared that someone was using them.

I tried a search for the Public account.  I ran pretty quickly into advice not to delete that folder, and a cry for help from someone who had done so.  End of story on that.

Well, how about the (padlocked) All Users folder?  For that, a search yielded the information that C:\Users\All Users was just a symbolic link to C:\ProgramData.  I attempted to check this.  Yes, both folders did seem to contain the same subfolders, apparently used by a variety of programs:  Adobe, Apple, Skype, etc.  The status bar at the bottom of Windows Explorer said there were 26 items in each.  It seemed that the All Users folder was there for backward compatibility with programs that would look for it instead of for C:\ProgramData.  In short, I could make things difficult by deleting it, and it seemed that deleting it wouldn't actually have anything to do with any real accounts.

This left me with the Default and Default User folders in C:\Users.  I didn't understand the difference between these two, so I ran a search.  MrBruce1959 said that Default was a system folder, not to be toyed with, whereas Default User was supposed to be the initial or default account for the person who would be using the computer.  In that case, I didn't understand why Windows created a separate Ray account (my choice of name, their choice of folder) instead of renaming Default User to be Ray when I was first setting up the system.  Why leave a superfluous Default User folder after the real default user has made an appearance? 

I tried a different search.  Someone passed along the rumor that I could just go ahead and delete the Default User folder.  Another post spoke blithely of deleting the Default User folder (actually, they said "profile," not folder) with a script, so as to replace it with a preconfigured Default User replacement.  That one was followed (at the bottom of the Experts Exchange page) with an extended discussion of programming technique, so apparently it was OK in principle to delete the folder, at least if a look-alike then took its place.  A post in another thread said that Default User was the one from which other user profiles were built.  I didn't plan on letting anyone else into my world, so I felt I could do without it for that purpose.

I decided to zip the Default User folder, delete it, and save the ZIP for future reference.  Before doing this, I made a System Restore backup (Start > Run > SystemPropertiesProtection.exe).  Also, since System Restore had been flaky sometimes in the past, I made an Acronis drive image.  I gave this some time, to see whether it would have adverse effects.  A couple of days later, the system seemed to be running OK.  The removal of the Default User folder did not seem to have any immediate or obvious negative effects.

Unlocking PDFs

I was working with PDF files.  For purposes of reading them onscreen, I found it helpful to go into Adobe Acrobat and crop off most of the white space around the text.  This would allow Acrobat's page view to show the text in a larger size, making it easier to read.  I also sometimes liked to add bookmarks.  And for many PDFs, I would add a comment balloon on the first page, citing the URL, bibliographic information, or other indications of where the PDF came from, for future reference.

None of these things were possible when the creator of the PDF would password-protect it.  I was not sure why people would do that.  Most of them didn't, but there was the occasional exception.  Maybe they feared that someone would go in and change their wording.  I had never seen or heard of that, in my years of working with PDFs.  It did not seem like a realistic concern, for purposes of the kinds of PDFs that I was working with.  Its drawback was that it made it irritating, difficult, and for some purposes impossible to work with what they had written.

To get rid of the password, so that I could make adjustments like those described above, I did a search for appropriate freeware.  The first site that came up was an About.com review of a handful of tools that were supposedly capable of unlocking PDF files.  Some of these programs could actually figure out what the original password was, though apparently that could take hours, days, or longer, depending on how complex the password was and what level of security was used.  It was evidently faster for a program to just break the password without trying to figure out what it was.

Among the tools listed in that About.com review, I had long used Freeware PDF Unlocker.  Unfortunately, I was not able to install the version available at this point (1.0.4) in 64-bit Windows 7, even though the About.com webpage said that I should have been able to do that.  The solution to that problem was to run it from within a Windows XP virtual machine (VM), created automatically by Windows Virtual PC.  Once I had installed Virtual PC, I had to go into it, open a Windows Explorer session (Start > Run > explorer), copy the Freeware PDF Unlocker installation program to Local Disk C, and install it from there.  I had to do that copying inside the VM because, of course, the virtual drive C used by Virtual PC did not actually exist on a hard drive:  it would not appear in Windows Explorer in Windows 7, outside of the VM. I had to install it from Local Disk C, inside the VM, because the VM would not install programs located on real drives.  Once it was installed, Freeware PDF Unlocker put an icon on the desktop in the VM.  I could then drag a passworded PDF from Windows Explorer, drop it on that icon, and get a PDF of the same name, with "_noPW" added at the end of the file's name.

Needless to say, it was a bit of a hassle to start a Windows XP VM, find the PDF in a Windows Explorer session inside the VM, and drag it over to the icon.  Freeware PDF Unlocker also was not able to unlock some PDFs with more advanced security, imposed by people who were desperate to insure that nobody would ever be able to change their words -- adding, perhaps, a faux testimonial about the author's positive experiences in having sex with animals.  I mean, that was certainly something to be worried about.  If I was going to continue with my work of inserting such comments into random PDFs, I was going to have to find a better PDF cracker.

The first relevant tool on the About.com list was Guaranteed PDF Decrypter (GuaPDF for short).  I ran it on a PDF that Freeware PDF Unlocker hadn't been able to unlock.  GuaPDF gave me a message stating that it definitely could unlock the file, but unfortunately the file was too large for the free version, so I was going to have to buy the paid version.  That was a possibility, but I decided first to continue down the About.com list.

The next option on that list was FreeMyPDF.com.  This was an online service.  I had to upload my PDF and let them do their magic on it.  I then spent a minute or two watching the charming RevolverMaps image, on their webpage, that showed how people around the world were using FreeMyPDF at this very ... well, recently.  I didn't snap out of it until FreeMyPDF had downloaded the decrypted PDF back to me, a minute or two later.  Its print was a bit faded, compared to the original, but it looked like everything was there.  Acrobat wasn't able to OCR its pages until I first saved them as JPGs and then stitched them back together in Acrobat, producing a much larger file.  Then again, I didn't really need to OCR its pages.  They were already OCRed.  I did it just because the OCR process (or, in this case, reducing the gamma on the individual JPGs in IrvanView > File > Batch Conversion/Rename > Advanced, after first testing on a sample JPG in IrfanView with Shift-G) could sometimes improve the appearance of the text.

Anyway, FreeMyPDF had done the job, so that killed the incentive to look further down the About.com list.  But if the incentive had been there, the next candidate would have been PDF Password Remover Online.  This appeared to be another upload-download option, though apparently (according to About.com) accommodating a smaller maximum PDF size.  Another option:  PdfCrypt, a command-line tool.  There were a couple of other tools on the About.com webpage, but they seemed to be password retrievers and, as I say, would thus presumably be slower.