It's been a while now, but when Windows 98 was stil a thing I can vividly remember that when the login screen appeared with the password prompt, I was simply able to hit the esc key on my keyboard to bypass this which then allowed me into Windows. I unfortunatley don't have a machine running 98 that I can test with, but just out of interest - when the above method is used to log into a machine, which account would then be used if multiple existed on the system?
11 Answer
Windows 9x did not have system-wide accounts acting as per-process credentials in the same way that WinNT and Unix systems do. Logging in would only load your profile (mostly HKCU registry) and set your network credentials (shared folders), but all processes would have the same local privileges.
Actually, I believe, even the per-user profiles were an option that had to be explicitly enabled via Control Panel, and the default was just to show the prompt for network authentication.
So if you didn't have per-user profiles, then there was no real difference between clicking "OK" vs clicking "Cancel" – Windows simply used the system default profile in all cases, and entering a password merely granted access to SMB or NetWare network folders and printers.
If you did have per-user profiles enabled, but clicked "Cancel", then Windows would also continue using the system default profile that it had already loaded. In this case, HKEY_CURRENT_USER in the Registry would be mapped to HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT.
