Outlook Password Problems

Every time it tried to get my emails it prompted me to enter my password. I entered my password and clicked a little box to tell Outlook to save it and away it went and got my emails. And then the next time it tried to get my emails it made me go through the whole palaver all over again. As I have several email addresses, this soon got to be pretty damn’ annoying.

I took a look at my Outlook account details (Tools, Account Settings), double-clicked each listed email address and reset the passwords but to no avail. Each time it tried to get my emails, I was prompted to enter my passwords all over again.

I don’t know what caused this problem but, having done a fair bit of Googling to try to find the solution, I can tell you that I am not alone in having suffered from it. The good news is that I eventually found the solution. Suffice to say it involves finding a registry key (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Protected Storage System), deleting its subkey (not the key itself) and rebooting the PC. As I am using Vista, giving myself all the permissions to do this took longer than doing the act itself. In essence, I ran regedit as an Administrator, then right-clicked the registry key and set every permission known to man and a few that probably aren’t - and, eventually, after much experimentation, I hit upon the correct combination of options (I’m sorry, I really can’t recall what these were - I’m afraid you’ll have to go through the same rigmarole for yourself) and managed to delete the damn’ thing.

I won’t go through all the details here as Microsoft has a page of instructions on the subject: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290684&Product=ol2002. There are three methods listed and I went for method number 3. Somewhat cryptically, this begins with the warning: “Note: the steps listed in this section should not be used on a computer running Windows Vista” and then fails to give any advice on what you should do on a computer running Vista.

Well, suffice to say, I ignored the warning and went ahead anyway and it worked just fine.