Windows 11: admin account stuck at PIN setup, UAC only shows No

Hi everyone, I’m having a strange Windows 11 account/admin issue.

I have three visible users on my PC:

• ricco / “andry03 ciao” — standard user
• andre_sldrvpr / “andrea catino” — standard user
• andre / “Riccola2003 Catino” — administrator

From a normal Command Prompt I ran:

net user

and I can see the local users. Then:

net localgroup Administrators

shows that the Administrators group contains:

• Administrator
• andre

So andre is definitely the admin account.

The problem:

• When I try to run anything as administrator from ricco or andre_sldrvpr, the UAC prompt only shows No, with no Yes option.
• I cannot log into the admin account andre from the login screen. It shows as “Riccola2003 Catino”.
• When I click Sign in, it opens Microsoft account login. The old email no longer exists, but I can sign in using the current Microsoft account email.
• After successful Microsoft login, Windows asks me to create a Windows Hello PIN.
• PIN creation always fails with: “Something went wrong. We weren’t able to set up your PIN. You can try again, or skip this step and set up a PIN later.”
• Both “Retry” and “Skip for now” lead back to the same error.
• This is not a global PIN/Windows Hello issue, because I re-created the PIN successfully for the standard account ricco.

Things I already tried:

• Advanced startup → Command Prompt → net user Administrator /active:yes, but that was from X:\Windows\System32, so it only affected the recovery environment and Administrator did not appear on the real login screen.
• From the real Windows installation, net user confirms the actual users are andre, andre_sldrvpr, and ricco.
• net user andre shows:
  
  
• Account active: Yes
• Local Group Memberships: Administrators, Users, docker-users
• net user ricco and net user andre_sldrvpr show only Users.
• runas /user:andre cmd works with the password I know, and opens a Command Prompt as DESKTOP-...\andre.
• However, that prompt is not elevated. Running net localgroup Administrators ricco /add from there gives “System error 5 has occurred. Access is denied.”
• Trying “Run as administrator” still only shows the UAC prompt with No.
• I also tried renaming the Windows Hello PIN folder Ngc from recovery:
  Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Ngc
  but after reboot the admin account still fails at PIN creation.
• I also tried “Reset this PC → Keep my files”; it did not solve the account/admin issue.

What I want:

I just need to either:

1. get into the admin account andre, or
2. elevate using the known andre password, or
3. add ricco to the Administrators group, or
4. repair the admin account’s Windows Hello/PIN login.

I would prefer to avoid “Reset this PC → Remove everything” or a clean USB install unless there is really no other option.

Is there a safe way to fix this without wiping the Windows installation?