A friend came by the other day and dropped off a computer he found cleaning out his old house. It's a windows 2000 professional and it looks like it works fine but it asks me for a username and password. He said the computer's been there before he moved into that house so he wouldn't know how to start it. Is there anyway i can do about this?

I hate these situations, there are those that appear to be able to sort these thongs easily, but TBH I've rarely managed to do it, the 1st question though is can you access ANY admin account ?
If you can life becomes much easier, if not it's time to go fishing lol, the 1st trick I would try is a reset on the CMOS, pull the mains lead from the system (shutting down first obviously), pop the battery and move the jumper to the clear position for a minute or so, then put it all back and fire it up, we may get lucky, and this is the least complicated way.

After that it gets more involved, and I'll want to do some research first as it's been a while, I know I've got lucky in the past with a CMOS reset, but it was more luck than chance, but are you in a position to slave this drive in another system at all ?
Just wondering if we can find anything out that way, maybe using Control Userpasswords2, otherwise we will need to use a specific tool for this.

One last thought though, what accounts show as being available for logging into ?
I'm wondering if we may be able to gain access via this way, also is there an admin account showing called admin ?
I'm wondering if we can log into that account rather than the users account, if it's not showing as an option type it into the login box and leave the password blank, if that fails try admin as a pass, the user name may be Admin or Administrator, try both, see if any of this helps.