Yes in past posts people have made suggestions. Their suggestions were to use LogonUserA, and everyone that had told me to do that had tried it on XP or NT systems. I am attempting to run the validation on a windows 2000 prof system, which is not working. The function always returns a zero, which means no match for the username and password. Now I am not attempting to view the password, I want to do this for a login screen for a program that I have written so I will never have to update or maintain a username and password data base for the program. This way it can all be done automatically through the domain administrator. If i was attempting to just view the password...there are many different methods I could take if i only just wanted to view a password on the system. The reason I have been reposting it is because i have no been able to get an answer about teh whole Windows 2000 deal, if that is even it, or to see if anyone has some other suggestions or windows api functions that might work.