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
    2018-02-20T22:58:50+00:00

    I was able to solve this by reducing the security level of Internet Explorer. Sharepoint and MS Office applications do not appear to handle the error well, but I was getting similar sign in errors on Visual Studio. There I was able to see that I was getting blocked by IE (The sign in window uses IE) for things like "https://secure.aadcdn.microsoftonline-p.com". After I fixed this by reducing security (or whitelisting all appropriate addresses) I was able to sign into Sharepoint Office 365 documents just fine.  

    1. Internet Options
    2. Security Tab
    3. Reduce Security level or whitelist proper addresses. 

    For MS - it would be worthwhile making a code change to behave similarly to Visual Studio and at least show the error instead of just closing the window and not working. :)

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-02-21T15:07:59+00:00

    Thank you Bruno, you just save me hours :)

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-03-03T06:51:27+00:00

    This is indeed an strange issue. Disconnecting and reconnecting my workaccount did solved the issue. Tx

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-03-09T15:51:57+00:00

    I followed your advice but there was no account to be removed.

    What I did was Add an account and after that I was able to sign into Excel.

    I remember seeing a pop a couple weeks ago asking me if I wanted to link my account to my apps and I just ignored it, I'm wondering if this has anything to do with that message.  When I was logging in it said something about adding my account to my windows app.  I didn't know if it was going to work so I didn't bother with a screen shot of the exact message, now I wish I did.

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