Unable to sign-in to Office 2016 desktop apps. Sign-in disappears after entering Office 365 account email address

Anonymous
2017-09-06T18:12:13+00:00

I am helping someone in our Office 365 tenant with a strange sign-in problem that affects only his Windows profile, and the issue is NOT in the Credential Manager.

This is his home computer running Windows 10 Home, build 1703. He is running the latest Office 2016 (installed the click to run apps from Office 365)

The problem began after he changed his Office 365 password. He can sign-in to the Web apps on another computer, and he can sign into Office 2016 apps on the same computer using a different Windows profile. For the problematic profile he signs into Windows using his personal Microsoft account. Then he signs into Outlook and Office 2016 with his Office 365 for Business account. Shouldn't be a problem...I do the same thing at home. The issue is that Outlook, Word, Excel, etc. will prompt him to sign in. When he enters his Office 365 email address (UPN), the sign-in screen immediately disappears without prompting him for a password. The sign in fails and Outlook says "Disconnected... need password)." 

The first thing I checked was Credential Manager, because that is usually the issue for things like this. We removed everything Microsoft or Office related from credential manager. It didn't help. Then we removed everything from credential manager, and it still didn't help. Repairing and then reinstalling office did not help.

I know that the problem is in his Windows profile, because he can sign-in just fine on the secondary Windows profile we created. So my question is this:

What do I need to delete from the registry and/or from the C:\users\username\appdata folder to resolve this issue with his Windows profile?

Thank you,

Sean

Microsoft 365 and Office | Subscription, account, billing | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2018-01-31T22:51:17+00:00

Hi

after the first attempt by Microsoft, which seemed to have worked for me, after a couple of days, the issue returned.

This time, they asked me to try something else which is to force some kind of different login screen for the O365 account in Office 2016.

This is what I did (and since a couple of weeks, I have had no issues):

Go to the registry editor (Win+R; regedit)

go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Microsoft ->Office -> 16.0 ->Common -> Identity

Inside "Identity", create a new REG_DWORD value called "EnableADAL" and leave the value at 0

Restart the PC and try again to login from Office 2016. In my case, the logon screen was now different and it worked perfectly.

Hope this helps you

Thanks,

Bruno Sales

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-01-08T16:46:29+00:00

    Hi

    I was facing the exact same issue and after some discussions with Microsoft, they were able to pinpoint the issue in my PC. Maybe it also helps you. Here's Microsoft answer:

    Please remove the SendToBluetooth add-in by following Method 2 in the article below (running the fix):

    "Office programs may crash with the SendToBluetooth add-in installed" -https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2803733/office-programs-may-crash-with-the-sendtobluetooth-add-in-installed

    I used the quick fix in the link above and I didn't even need to restart my PC... just reopening an office app worked and my user was immediately signed in to my O365 account.

    Hope this helps

    Bruno

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-01-05T19:08:07+00:00

    We had this issue happening for the first time for one client! they had multiple people with that issue and it caused us a lot of problems and waste of time, we reset over 6 windows user profiles and some of them the problem comes back! The first time it happened we contacted Office365 support they spent hours and couldn't fix it, till i found out resetting profile is a workaround, every time my customer has this problem i spend couple of hours trying to fix it and i  give up and reset the profile! today I finally found this I tried it and it worked, i never wrote in a form but this time i did because its worth it, this fix should be moved to the top of this page with the icon that shows that this is the fix for it.

    Thank you very much Jon, you can't imagine how much time u saved me that i would have wasted in the future trying to fix it.

    FYI i think this happened here a lot for this customer because when they first signed up with O365 they did it through Comcast and they did it with a wrong company name or wrong account and later had to cancel that account and start a new one with the correct company name. I think the traces of the old account sign-ons caused this problem to happen on some of the computers. 

    Please move this fix to the top of the list a lot of people are having this issue and can't find the fix!

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-12-17T07:58:51+00:00

    Hi Benoît,

    First please try the suggestions mentioned in this thread.

    If the issue remains, we'd suggest you create a new thread, our support engineer will provide further help based on your current situation.

    Thanks,

    Jim

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-12-14T18:36:12+00:00

    Hello,

    I face the exact same problem. Linking Office 365 with personal account is OK. But linking with business account gives the same problem. The sign in window suddenly disappears. OneDrive (business) cannot be linked in Office 365 so documents can only be opened read-only. This is an issue specific to that business account and to that computer (the other ones work fine). It would be great if we only have to delete one or two files or folders in the user profile instead of creating a blank one.

    Anyway, the control panel > accounts show only my link to on-prem AD, nothing else.

    Thank for your support

    +1

    One day the password window appeared and I was able to sign in but recently and without reason I've been prompted to sign in again. Between when I got my PC at work and now it is this exact same problem. It's extremely frustrating.

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