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

Anonymous

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

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Anonymous

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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101 additional answers

Anonymous

2017-11-01T18:42:03+00:00

After investigating some of the other threads here I found this piece

"Ok i was able to get further by going to Settings --> accounts --> works and school accounts

I removed all work and school accounts

I'm trying to reconnect the account and it is better, at least I can sign in, but there are still account errors." in https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice\_install-mso\_win10-mso\_o365b/office-365-small-business-premium-changed-to/44dde7e5-5b76-4906-91f2-594bec6dfac5

This seemed to fix my issue.

I'll report back if there are other issues with this.
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Anonymous

2017-11-01T18:30:11+00:00

I can confirm the exact same problem, after a password change my login stopped to work (ie. the login process "dies" after typing in user account)

* have reinstalled office twice, tried both 32 and 64 bit version

* removed everything from credential manager

It is dead in the water, please supply a fix.

I am starting my master thesis next month, and need Word 2016 functional on this computer.
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Anonymous

2017-11-01T14:02:31+00:00
I am having the same issue as the original poster Sean,

We are a small business running Windows 10 Pro 1703 build 15063.674 with Office 2016 version 1709 build 8528.2147.
1. Re-installing office doesn't solve the issue
2. Recreating the profile worked for a day, but then the issue returned again later
The user's Outlook says "need password" and when they try to click on it, the box appears and quickly disappears. Using the button in the ribbon to enter credentials does the same thing. A few weeks ago we enabled modern authentication so I wonder if that has anything to do with this issue.

Tried deleting all credentials out of the credential manager and adding the account into the "Email, calendar, and contacts" page of Settings without success.
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Anonymous

2017-10-04T21:48:29+00:00

Hi Leona,

If you are still experiencing the issue, please provide the information Jim requested so we can involve the related team.

Regards,

Sheen
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