Brian Livingston is an idiot
A recent rant written by columnist Tim Mullen of security focus makes some interesting points regarding the latest proposed windows XP security hole. Mullen states: “The perceived issue, which started its life on Brian Livingston's Web log and spun out of control from there, comes from the fact that if you boot the Win2k Recovery Console on a machine loaded with XP, it dumps you out to a command prompt without asking you for the XP administrator password.”Mullen goes on to explain that “this is expected, and desirable, behavior. The Win2k RC can't read the XP registry, so it thinks it is a corrupted Win2k installation. When it can't verify the SAM, it bails out to the console. Administrators want this behavior. If you have an installation on which some third-party driver has hosed the registry, the Recovery Console will allow you to attempt to fix it. That's what 'Recovery Console'"
Also note that co-author of this site made it a point to me that every other desktop operating system, including Linux, and OSX have that exact same feature. That when you boot off these systems installation CDs you can recover the systems “root” password.