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
    2020-03-03T19:10:35+00:00

    Have you tried the EnableADAL fix? Might be possible to query the setting on logon, so you at least know the extent of the issue, first!

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-03-03T18:58:07+00:00

    We have the same issue on an enterprise scale.  Simply deleting the OST file and letting it recreate fixes the issue and the log on prompt comes back up.  However... we go through this with multiple users each day.  When running exchange accounts this was not an issue.  This has been since switching to O365 and using the Outlook 2016 client.  We can't seem to find a common factor.  We know it occurs if they change the password.  But other times it just fails to load.  So we delete the OST and off they go again.  I've looked through logs and can't find anything other than Outlook stopped responding.  

    I would like to find what setting or setup change is needed to allow Outlook 2016 and O365 to work seamlessly.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-02-26T13:55:46+00:00

    Thanks Bruno. 

    Two years later, and your suggestion still works :)  I didn't even need to do the restart - I was just in the process of signing into O365 in Word, the icon and email address fields filled themselves in like magic.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-01-28T23:59:27+00:00

    Thank you, this regedit did the trick.  I had a user having trouble with her 365 account.  I followed the steps and like magic, shes back in her mailbox and other office apps.  Thanks for the post.

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