After many tries to find out what my lost password was on my acer computer with Vista, I tried this and it worked like a champ. And easy too. I am not a computer geek.  Just a good troubleshooter.

1. I downloaded Partedit32

2. started program and changed the pqservice partition type from 27 to 7

3. restarted computer, pressed F2 on startup, went into bios and disabled d2d recovery. Saved and started computer

4. for the next step I kept in mind that if windows started after this, acer somehow changes the type 7 back to 27, so I figured to not go into windows, when computer was restarting I pressed F8 a number of times and went into a windows recovery option.

5.  After a drill down of a couple of menus I found an option at this point to go out to dos.

6. after i was in dos, guess what, I had a drive letter x, in my case, so I figured this may be the hidden partition, so I did this at the x prompt

7. type dir

8. looked for aimdrs.dat file (i was told thats where the password is) found it

9. did this command  at the prompt:    copy aimdrs.dat c:

10. stated 1 file copied

11. exited out of cmd and rebooted my computer normal.

12. Then after booting I opened up notepad, went to file open, found aimdrs.dat on c drive and presto, opened the file and password, hint in the file.

summary 

Dont forget to go back to bios and enable d2d recovery. Also checked type for the pqservice partition with partedit32 and back to normal type 27

good luck.  Thanks for the great help on this site. I love it