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
    2018-03-14T20:25:47+00:00

    Bruno,

    Thank you so much Kind Sir!

    This saved me much grief from a OneNote company access and was instant the moment I restarted and entered my login data.

    Thank you for your kind posting of your assistance from Microsoft.

    Regards,

    Mark

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-03-16T15:48:47+00:00

    We have this same issue in our organisation. So far we have deleted profiles as a fix but have to test deleting account in Win10 settings next time. This bug is a "killer" feature for O365 roll-out. When this bug hits end-users they are totally out of their productive work because they can not edit their documents in One Drive with their desktop Office 2016. Online Office offers very little help in this kind of situation, real work happens with desktop applications. I really hope Microsoft takes this serious and fixes this bug. Postings here are probably just a tip of the iceberg.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-03-22T20:20:43+00:00

    Thanks for pointing me in the right direction Bruno,

    Just wanted to share I was also able to resolve the issue by deleting the entire Identity reg folder and restarting office. Once I opened office it recreated the keys.

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

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-03-27T07:42:19+00:00

    Thank you, EnableADAL worked.

    I don't know though, how is it that there still are so many problems with MS Office signing in. At least twice a month, a registry edit is required.

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