lets be very clear here....win9x password "protection" is not protection...period... all it does is log you on to your desktop settings...anyone can hit the esc button at the login dialog and have complete access to your files.

also, as has been said, deleting the pwl files makes the old passwords go away...then you just log on with your old user name and a new pwd....so you could do that...or someone else could ...but the point really is this...win9x/me have no built in security features for locally logged on users

you can prevent a casual attacker from obtain access to your files over a network, by disabling file sharing and if you must share files, you can enable passwords in the SHARE properties setting ...however, this is poor at best...and it's all or nothing....there's no granularity...