Windows 10: Creating a Password Reset Disk won't show the wizzard

[German]Strange bug in Windows 10 in the feature "Create password reset disk". A reader pointed out to me that nothing the wizard isn't displayed when he called that feature. I tried to reproduce the problem on my Windows 10 test system and encountered the same error. I've rehashed it and I'm curious to see if this affects other Windows 10 users.

A password reset disk is a disk – now a USB stick, not a floppy disk – that allows a user to access their local user account if they forget their password. The feature has been around since Windows Vista and was described by Microsoft here.

With such a medium, one can easily reset the account's password without losing access to user account contents. Actually a brilliant thing (I've used it too), if Microsoft wouldn't constantly break stuff on Windows and wouldn't constantly look to the cloud with Microsoft account coercion.

A reader feedback

It was back in May 2022 when German blog reader Frank S. emailed in with an observation (the process stuck with me because I haven't booted a Windows 10 test system in ages to check it out for myself). Frank wrote (I've translated it):

Curious bug in Windows 10 when calling the "Create password reset disk" function

Good morning, Mr. Born,

I noticed a curious bug in the "Create password reset disk" feature of Windows 10 yesterday. I administer 2 desktop PCs (Asus motherboards) and 3 notebooks (2*Lenovo, 1*MSI) at our home. Whenever I change the administrator's password, I create a password reset file using the above function. Yesterday I tried to do that again, but it didn't work because you can't see the wizard window anymore. Nothing appears in the taskbar either.

I.e. the wizard starts, but no window can be seen on the desktop. All tricks like changing the resolution, connecting a second monitor and safe mode do not change anything. The window is not visible and neither is an icon in the task bar. The only way to see that the program is running is to press Alt-Tab. You can see the window, but you can't do anything with it.

I first thought this was a bug on one machine, but it occurs on all 5 devices that have slightly different Windows version levels.

Since Microsoft won't listen to me when I try to report a bug (quote: "We don't take bug reports from individuals"), I thought I'd tell you about it. You might be interested.

I have now found the time to briefly test the problem myself on a Windows 10 21H2 machine. First, I typed in "create password reset" in the startmenu and then clicked on the Start menu entry in question (see also here and here or here). As expected, the desktop remained empty, no window of the password reset disk creation wizard appeared. I then pressed the Alt-Tab key combination to see the list of running tasks and got the following display:

Indeed, a Password Wizard was listed as running there. So the wizard has been launched, but its window is probably hidden. Only when I selected the entry in the task list did the window of the wizard to create a password reset disk appear. Is the create a password reset wizard works on your Windows 10 environment?