Two logins, one account?

A friend has an up-to-date Win11 Pro system. When he boots up (without doing anything) he sees his account name and an error message (I translated from Dutch so the real English version might differ slightly): "Username or password is incorrect. Try again".

There is an OK button and if he clicks that, a screen with his account name and below a user-box with his username (<> his accountname!) with an empty password box shows. (BTW: In the lower left corner he sees that there are two known accounts on his system.)
If he enters the PW, he logs into his system.

If he does NOT click the OK button, after a short while, the screen disappears and a log in screen appears with the SAME account name, but now with a different account picture (which appears to be the other of the two accounts seen earlier in the lower left corner). This screen shows the option to enter a PIN. If he enters the PIN, he logs in THE SAME ACCOUNT as before.... (also: if he chooses not to enter a PIN but a PW, he can enter his PW -the same as for the 'other' account- and that works as well).

Of course he can also manually select either account from the lower left two options: the screens and authentication methods differ (PW vs PIN) but both log into the same Windows environment...

Long story short:
1 Initial action as if the system wants to 'auto login' but fails
2 Two accounts visible on the login screen, both use the same account name (in larger font above the user/PW boxes) but show different account pictures. Both log into the same Windows account after successful authentication

Something seems to be seriously messed up here. How can we remove one of the two accounts and eliminate the failing auto-login?
Top

A User can have two entries/accounts in C:\Users but one name should be at least one character different from the other or all documents/data will go into the same folders, hard to separate. Had to deal with a computer with the problem a few months ago.

To always be required to select account & enter password Turn off automatic login. In search box type netplwiz.
Select netplwiz run command from search results.
Put a check by "users must enter a username nd password to use this computer."
apply-OK
The user will then automatically be prompted to select an account and enter a password from login screen.

Regarding having 2 accounts with same name, You did not say if this is a MS account or a local account. Are both accounts the same account type? You really do not know what the user did (or attempted to do) to get that result. I'm only speculating here, but if I was betting I would say it involved his changing an account name, maybe even on the hidden administrator account which is a no-no. Regardless of how it happened, if 2 accounts of the same name do not exist in settings>accounts where one can be removed, it might take backing up his data, creating a new local account, logging into that account, and, deleting his current account. Once the account list is cleaned up, he can change the local account to a MS account if he wants.

Edited Disregard my speculation. I just remembered that using auto login has been known to generate 2 like accounts. Using netplwiz as I instructed will get rid of the duplicate.

Original answer edited

Berton said:

A User can have two entries/accounts in C:\Users but one name should be at least one character different from the other or all documents/data will go into the same folders, hard to separate. Had to deal with a computer with the problem a few months ago.

Click to expand...

Thanks. Both logins end up in the same account (so yes: the same folders for documents and data)

glasskuter said:

To always be required to select account & enter password Turn off automatic login. In search box type netplwiz.
Select netplwiz run command from search results.
Put a check by "users must enter a username nd password to use this computer."
apply-OK
The user will then automatically be prompted to select an account and enter a password from login screen.

Regarding having 2 accounts with same name, You did not say if this is a MS account or a local account. Are both accounts the same account type? You really do not know what the user did (or attempted to do) to get that result. I'm only speculating here, but if I was betting I would say it involved his changing an account name, maybe even on the hidden administrator account which is a no-no. Regardless of how it happened, if 2 accounts of the same name do not exist in settings>accounts where one can be removed, it might take backing up his data, creating a new local account, logging into that account, and, deleting his current account. Once the account list is cleaned up, he can change the local account to a MS account if he wants.

Edited Disregard my speculation. I just remembered that using auto login has been known to generate 2 like accounts. Using netplwiz as I instructed will get rid of the duplicate.

Click to expand...

Thanks. These are both MS accounts (so not local). I tried netplwiz on my own system (where I don't have auto-logon enabled). But I don't see the option "users must enter a username and password to use this computer." . Is it something that's only visible when auto-login is enabled then?

Update: removing the auto-logon also fixed the double accounts. All is working normally again.
Thanks for the quick help. Very much appreciated!