Originally Posted By: pca
... His wife needs to get access to his paypal and ebay accounts for the business he ran. ... There is a decent chance that his accounts are logged in on his windows box, or the passwords are stored there, but of course, THAT also has a password on it that she doesn't know...

Now, presuming he didn't use disk encryption, the obvious solution is to plug the drive from the computer into another system, or in fact boot it from a USB stick into linux. Either approach should allow access to the filesystem. But if things are not quite that easy, is there any viable method to bypass the password on a modern windows system?
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Given the scenarios listed, shutting down the Windows computer may lose access to the currently logged PayPal and ebay accounts? Should the desired account passwords not be present.

If the fellow had any other device (Smartphone or tablet) that also has access to the email accounts linked to ebay and PayPal, I might start there. Reset the ebay password, wait for the confirm email with password reset link. Click that, reset password. Should allow access.

Same method with PayPal. But there may also be ‘secret security questions’ to which the answers must be given.

Tricky stuff, to get the sequence just right or access to some accounts may never be recovered.