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I have faced this issue several times where my users forget their password to log onto their local account on the laptop or desktop. If you google, *how do I recover Windows vista or XP password* you will see tons of articles on this topic. I have used few of them but the winner is Ophcrack.

Ophcrack is a free (open source) Microsoft Windows password cracker/recovery tool based on rainbow tables (is a lookup table offering a time-memory tradeoff used in recovering the plaintext password from a password hash generated by a hash function, often a cryptographic hash function. A common application is to make attacks against hashed passwords feasible).

Quick user guide:

1. Download the ophcrack from the website. When you go to ophcrack download page you will notice there are LiveCD ISO’s for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Based on the operating system of your troubled computer download the ISO for that operating system (XP or Vista). It won’t hurt to download both because you never know when you might need them.
2. Burn the ISO image on to a CD. It will create a bootable CD for you. I use Roxio CD creator for this. You can use anything you like.
3. Now put the CD into the CD Rom and make sure you can boot from the CD Rom. You may require some tweaking on the BIOS.
4. When it boots from the CD – you will see the list of the accounts on the computer. For example – if you have accounts called Administrator, User1, Amy, Simon and out of these accounts you have password only on User1 and the account Amy then you will see that there are hash numbers beside those two accounts. The accounts you don’t have any password set will display *empty* – literarily.
5. The machine will do its thing and just leave it. After a while, you will see password has been retrieved and displayed on the screen beside the accounts those are password protected.
6. After you see it – remember it just reboot the machine and you should be able to log in on windows.

Link to ophcrack: http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net

Other interesting read:

1. Rainbow table
2. Time-memory trade off
3. ISO

Hope this helped.