Hi. Docker Desktop is for development not for using it as a service. There were discussions about it in many other topics and some users managed to find some tricky ways, but I would not recommend it if you are planning to use it in the long term. Since it was not designed to run as a service, whatever you do, it can break with any update.
If you want to keep what you already configured as an admin user, you can run Docker Desktop there again and export the volumes, move the configuration files to another users.
If you are just playing with Docker, it is okay to try it interactively and learn about what it can do, but when you intention is to run it for long, you should configure it in a way that allows you to move the project to a new machne or just restore the project when anything happens with Docker Desktop.
So hopefully you used a compose file you still have the command to recreate the project under another user using the same images and parameters, and have the config files mounted from Windows. If not, you need to figure out where data was stored, and copy that out and move to the new location.
Everything depends on what and how you did so far, so I would not describe the whole process yet, but if you want, we can discuss how you can move your work under the new user.
Docker Desktop stores its virtual machine image under “AppData”, the hidden folder in the user’s profile folder, but I have no idea if just copying that to the new user could work. It seems risky at least.
Regarding starting your container automatically on Windows boot, the safer way is to start a Linux virtual machine and configure that to start automatically, and install Docker CE in that virtual machine.
If it really has to work as a server, the best would be using a bare metal Linux or Windows Server machine instead of a VM running on Windows 11 Pro, but that should work too as long as you know how to create and configure the VM to start automatically.
