er, this is still win2000, right? i'll assume so.
well, i honestly don't know enough about the workings of it to say. in *nix, there isn't really password protection so much as there is different permissions. if it's like this, you'd just switch to a different user, one that has permissions to access the file. any password protection you would find would just be the encryption of data that would require a certain key to decrypt. if that is the case, you'd just find the decrypting application supplied by win2000 and give it the key(password)...
maybe there's a win2000 api for dealing with it's password protected files - check search.cpan.org
or, you could undergo the task of cracking the win2000 file control systems :-D that sounds like alot more fun anyway.
if noone else has an answer, try asking in the win2000 forum - they may have a better idea of what's going on here.
sorry i couldn't help more,
stillflame "If you think you're too small to make a difference, try spending a night in a closed tent with a mosquito."
