Having a password recovery app like the one found here would be very helpful....
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

I would agree and I can even make a case for it:

We use images here for our NT4 systems. Although we do not need to use them very often as XP is everywhere these days and connected to an AD. About 1 week ago I needed to restore an NT4 image from backup that's over 3 years old and I could not remember the password used as it changed fairly regularly.

If I had had chntpw on the SystemRescueCD I could have reset it very quickly with that. Unfortunately, I ended up hunting down this software on a different recovery disk which had a lot less software than this one.