Password expired and unable to change it

Hi all.

I'm running Windows 7 Professional x64 as a Parallels virtual machine on my Mac (part of my requirements to work for replacing my Windows-based laptop with a Mac). As such, I still run quite a few Windows applications because either 1) there is no Mac equivalent, or 2) the Mac equivalent sucks.

Today there was a message on my Windows VM stating:

"Your password has expired and must be changed"

I click OK, the standard password change screen comes up asking for my current password, and the new password twice.

I fill this out, it says "Changing password..." for 5 seconds or so, then comes up with an error stating:

"Configuration information could not be read from the domain controller, either because the machine is unavailable, or access has been denied."

The problem is, this (virtual) machine is not a member of a domain. I personally installed the OS from DVD in the virtual machine, and at no time was it joined to the domain (I don't even have permission to do so).

My only choice on this screen is to click OK again, which takes me back to the change password prompt again.

In another thread on the forum, there was another person with a similar issue and they resolved it by booting into Safe Mode and changing their password. Unfortunately this did not work for me ... rebooting into safe mode with networking support generates the same error, and normal safe mode states this:

"An attempt was made to logon, but the network logon service was not started"

Can anybody suggest a way forward from here? Any help would be appreciated. TIA!

FYI, I was able to resolve this by trying a bunch of different things. The working solution was using the ntpasswd utility posted in Need to bypass 'Your password has expired' using recovery CLI prompt

I cleared the password for my account, unlocked the account. Interestingly enough, the "password does not expire" flag was already set. After this, I rebooted into Windows, logged in using no password, and all was fine.