The Windows 11 login screen does give us a link to click in case you forget your PIN code. The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows’ root account. After we do this, we can finally log back into her Windows 11 account with the newly-set password. Darkest of patternsMy wife and I fell victim to a series of dark patterns that nearly rendered her Windows 11 installation unrecoverable. This tragedy of dark patterns then neatly cascaded into a catastrophic comedy of bugs, where a full root drive apparently corrupts online Microsoft accounts on Windows 11 so hard they become essentially unrecoverable.