Outlook need password. 1812 Bug or Feature? You decide.

[John Long]

This has been happening to me for the past month. It's getting worse. 

Office 365 1812 build 11126.20266.

I'm sure it's a bug, ahem, I mean a feature in the latest version...

The password box never comes up. I see a window flash and disappear when I click on Need Password.

Then outlook will freeze and crash.

To get around this I have to sign out of my office 365 account and sign back in. Click File, Office Account, Sign Out. I still have to restart outlook. After that it will work.

Problem is this is becoming a reoccurring issue daily now.

Luckily everyone in my office is on the Semi-annual Channel and is on 1808.

I don't want to hack the registry to fix this. I also don't want to recreate my mapi profile, though I may do that just because it's so common to do when having problems like this. I mainly want to put this discussion out there because I really feel like it's a bug that needs to be fixed.

Thanks,

John

[#2]

Collect a Fiddler trace to see on which URL you are getting 401s. This might give you a clue about what might be wrong. Additionally, you could install the Exchange Online extension for Fiddler, maybe it makes it easier to spot what's going wrong.

[#3]

Not sure what Fiddler trace is. After searching it I'm not sure how that would help me. I went ahead and uninstalled office and reinstalled it last week. So far it hasn't happened again. It's just annoying. I'll reply to this if it happens again.

John

[#4]

Fiddler acts like a web proxy and sees all the requests sent by Outlook and the responses received. When a request receives a 401 response, that's when Outlook might prompt for password.

Seeing for which type of request was Outlook receiving 401s could lead to understanding what was causing the problem.

[#5]

Well, it's happening again. I can't understand what the cause is. Basically the sign in screen flashes and goes away. A workaround was to go to file account and sign out of the office 365 account and sign back in. Now that doesn't work. I signed out but now when I try to sign back into my Microsoft account I put in my email address and click next then the sign in screen disappears and the password prompt never comes up.

At this point I'm just baffled. It might be time to just reinstall windows. I don't have much time on this install, maybe about 4 months which is a little quick to go south so soon. I just don't want to waste a bunch of time troubleshooting when wiping it out completely and starting over might fix it. If it happens again after that, well I might just put a hole in the computer and call it a day lol!

[#6]

Have you tried SARA (https://diagnostics.outlook.com/)? Its an easy to use tool that checks your system and can make suggestions or even apply fixes.

Or, if you have an O365 subscription, you can contact support.