Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation

Last night, my wife looks up from her computer, troubled. She tells me she can’t log into her computer running Windows 11, as every time she enters the PIN code to her account, the login screen throws up a cryptic error: “Your credentials could not be verified”. She’s using the correct PIN code, so that surely isn’t it. We opt for the gold standard in troubleshooting and perform a quick reboot, but that doesn’t fix it. My initial instinct is that since she’s using an online account instead of a local one, perhaps Microsoft is having some server issues? A quick check online indicates that no, Microsoft’s servers seem to be running fine, and to be honest, I don’t even know if that would have an effect on logging into Windows in the first place.

The Windows 11 login screen does give us a link to click in case you forget your PIN code. Despite the fact the PIN code she’s entering is correct, we try to go through this process to see if it goes anywhere. This is where things really start to get weird. A few dialogs flash in and out of existence, until it’s showing us a dialog telling us to insert a security USB key of some sort, which we don’t have. Dismissing it gives us an option to try other login methods, including a basic password login. This, too, doesn’t work; just like with the PIN code, Windows 11 claims the accurate, correct password my wife is entering is invalid (just to be safe, we tested it by logging into her Microsoft account on her phone, which works just fine).

In the account selection menu in the bottom-left, an ominous new account mysteriously appears: WsiAccount.

The next option we try is to actually change the PIN code. This doesn’t work either. Windows wants us to use a second factor using my wife’s phone number, but this throws up another weird error, this time claiming the SMS service to send the code isn’t working. A quick check online once again confirms the service seems to be working just fine for everybody else. I’m starting to get really stumped and frustrated.

Of course, during all of this, we’re both searching the web to find anything that might help us figure out what’s going on. None of our searches bring up anything useful, and none of our findings seem to be related to or match up with the issue we’re having. While she’s looking at her phone and I’m browsing on my Fedora/KDE PC next to hers, she quickly mentions she’s getting a notification that OneDrive is full, which is odd, since she doesn’t use OneDrive for anything.

We take this up as a quick sidequest, and we check up on her OneDrive account on her phone. As OneDrive loads, our jaws drop in amazement: a big banner warning is telling her she’s using over 5500% of her 5GB free account. We look at each other and burst out laughing. We exchange some confused words, and then we realise what is going on: my wife just got a brand new Samsung Galaxy S25, and Samsung has some sort of deal with Microsoft to integrate its services into Samsung’s variant of Android. Perhaps during the process of transferring data and applications from her old to her new phone, OneDrive syncing got turned on? A quick trip to the Samsung Gallery application confirms our suspicions: the phone is synchronising over 280GB of photos and videos to OneDrive.

My wife was never asked for consent to turn this feature on, so it must’ve been turned on by default. We quickly turn it off, delete the 280GB of photos and videos from OneDrive, and move on to the real issue at hand.

Since nothing seems to work, and none of what we find online brings us any closer to what’s going on with her Windows 11 installation, we figured it’s time to bring out the big guns. For the sake of brevity, let’s run through the things we tried. Booting into safe mode doesn’t work; we get the same login problems. Trying to uninstall the latest updates, an option in WinRE, doesn’t work, and throws up an unspecified error. We try to use a restore point, but despite knowing for 100% certain the feature to periodically create restore points is enabled, the only available restore point is from 2022, and is located on a drive other than her root drive (or “C:” in Windows parlance). Using the reset option in WinRE doesn’t work either, as it also throws up an error, this time about not having enough free space. I also walk through a few more complex suggestions, like a few manual registry hacks related to the original error using cmd.exe in WinRE. None of it yields any results.

It’s now approaching midnight, and we need to get up early to drop the kids off at preschool, so I tell my wife I’ll reinstall her copy of Windows 11 tomorrow. We’re out of ideas.

The next day, I decide to give it one last go before opting for the trouble of going through a reinstallation. The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows’ root account. It involves booting into WinRE, loading up cmd.exe, and replacing utilman.exe in system32 with cmd.exe:

move c:windowssystem32utilman.exe c:
copy c:windowssystem32cmd.exe c:windowssystem32utilman.exe

If you then proceed to boot into Windows 11 and click on the Accessibility icon in the bottom-right, it will open “utilman.exe”, but since that’s just cmd.exe with the utilman.exe name, you get a command prompt to work with, right on the login screen. From here, you can launch regedit, find the correct key, change a REG_BINARY, save, and reboot. At the login screen, you’ll see a new “adminstrator” account with full access to your computer.

During the various reboots, I do some more web searching, and I stumble upon a post on /r/WindowsHelp from 7 months ago. The user William6212 isn’t having the exact same issues and error messages we’re seeing, but it’s close enough that it warrants a look at the replies. The top reply by user lemonsandlimes30 contains just two words:

storage full
↫ lemonsandlimes30, the real MVP

And all of a sudden all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. I instantly figure out the course of events: my wife gets her new Galaxy S25, and transfers over the applications and data from her old phone. During this setup process, the option in the Samsung Gallery application to synchronise photos and videos to OneDrive is enabled without her consent and without informing her. The phone starts uploading the roughly 280GB of photos and videos from her phone to her 5GB OneDrive account, and she gets a warning notification that her OneDrive storage is a bit full.

And now her Windows 11 PC enters the scene. Despite me knowing with 100% certainty I deleted OneDrive completely off her Windows 11 PC, some recent update or whatever must’ve reinstalled it and enabled its synchronisation feature, which in turn, right as my wife’s new phone secretly started uploading her photos and videos to OneDrive, started downloading those same photos and videos to her Windows 11’s relatively small root drive. All 280GB of them.

Storage full.

The reboots were done, and indeed, the secret passwordless administrator account was now available on the login screen. I log in, wait for Windows 11’s stupid out-of-box-experience thing to run its course, immediately open Explorer, and there it is: her root drive is completely full, with a mere 25MB or so available. We go into her account’s folder, delete the OneDrive folder and its 280GB of photos and videos, and remove OneDrive from her computer once again. Hopefully this will do the trick.

It didn’t. We still can’t log in, as the original issue persists. I log back into the administrator account, open up compmgmt.msc, go to Users, and try to change my wife’s password. No luck – it’s an online account, and it turns out you can’t change the password of such an account using traditional user management tools; you have to log into your Microsoft account on the web, and change your password there. After we do this, we can finally log back into her Windows 11 account with the newly-set password.

We fixed it.

Darkest of patterns

My wife and I fell victim to a series of dark patterns that nearly rendered her Windows 11 installation unrecoverable. The first dark pattern is Samsung enabling the OneDrive synchronisation feature without my wife’s consent and without informing her. The second dark pattern is Microsoft reinstalling OneDrive onto my wife’s PC without my wife’s consent and without informing her. The third dark pattern is OneDrive secretely downloading 280GB of photos and videos without once realising this was way more data than her root drive could store. The fifth and final dark pattern runs through all of this like a red thread: Microsoft’s insistence on forcefully converting every local Windows 11 user account to an online Microsoft account.

This tragedy of dark patterns then neatly cascaded into a catastrophic comedy of bugs, where a full root drive apparently corrupts online Microsoft accounts on Windows 11 so hard they become essentially unrecoverable. There were no warnings and no informational popups. Ominous user accounts started to appear on the login screen. Weird suggestions to use corporate-looking security USB keys pop up. Windows wrongfully tells my wife the PIN code and password she enters are incorrect. The suggestion to change the password or PIN code breaks completely. All the well-known rescue options any average user would turn to in WinRE throw up cryptic errors.

At this point, any reasonable person would assume their Windows 11 installation was unrecoverable, or worse, that some sort of malware had taken over their machine – ominous “WsiAccount” and demands for a security USB key and all. The only course of action most Windows users would take at this point is a full reinstallation. If it wasn’t for me having just enough knowledge to piece the puzzle together – thank you lemonsandlimes30 – we’d be doing a reinstallation today, possibly running into the issue again a few days or weeks later.

No sane person would go this deep to try and fix this problem.

This cost us hours and hours of our lives, causing especially my wife a significant amount of stress, during an already very difficult time in our lives (which I won’t get into). I’m seething with rage towards Microsoft and its utter incompetence and maliciousness. Let me, for once, not mince words here: Windows 11 is a travesty, a loose collection of dark patterns and incompetence, run by people who have zero interest in lovingly crafting an operating system they can be proud of. Windows has become a vessel for subscriptions and ads, and cannot reasonably be considered anything other than a massive pile of user-hostile dark patterns designed to extract data, ad time, and subscription money from its users.

If you can switch away and ditch Windows, you should. The ship is burning, and there’s nobody left to put out the fires.