Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll try and address your responses individually.

- We used to have a system whereby I set all the passwords. New security policy. No more.

- legality of password databases - I don't think it's illegal - the data is the company's and they (I as admin) have rights to gain access to it at any time if need be under our security audit

- make the program run as a service - Bwahahaha - No offense but that would mean our programming team would need to do their job right the first time

- cracking the SAM - I could do that, but some security officer - the ***** - (me) set a strong password policy of min of 8 characters, three of the following four - upper case, lwer case, numeric and symbol. Most passwords are 10+ characters. It takes even l0phtcrack days just to come up with a couple passwords. Plust the ******* (m,e) set the polict to have 30 day turnaround on password changes, uniques with a history of five previous passwords.

Customers are a little picky on just who and when people access their databases, Very sensitive as of late with the larger customers and their security audits.

I decided the following - if someone leaves fr a while and i have legit need to get in to their computer - tough **** if they didnt save their work and ..

if the network problem is so huge that I need to stop programs from running, in all likelyhood the database server is puking already. Tough noogies if they have to rerun a three day load. They'll get over it. My primary objective is to protect the servers.