Constant login prompts with Office applications

Topic

New Reply

Hi,

I’m seeing a particularly annoying problem.

Some users are asked to log in to Office 365 services again and again, from Office applications. And I mean *every* time they open a file, even if it’s a local one. Canceling or failing authentication closes the application with an error, losing unsaved changes in other open files.

I’ve been seeing this with Outlook, Excel, Word and PowerPoint. All report as activated, it’s just the Office 365 authentication. Authentication works for the web interface, server mailbox access, OneDrive / OneDrive for Business, and Skype for Business.

Seen on both Business Premium and E* subscriptions, both Windows 7 and 10. Might even have a 2016 Home&Business with Business Essentials in one case, yet to confirm. These people are in very different organizations and don’t even know of each other’s existence as far as I can tell…

In some cases, turning off all access in Options / Trust Center / Trust Center Settings / Privacy Options helps, in others it doesn’t, and certainly causes significant loss of functionality if the organization happens to keep data in SharePoint Online…

Clearing all related credentials from Credential Manager used to help with this kind of thing before, but now it apparently no longer does.

Removing and reinstalling Office applications completely, with the cleanup tool, also doesn’t help.

Would anyone happen to have any clues on where to look for a solution?

At this point I’d think it’s probably somewhere in the user profile but those have lots of data that would be a lot of bother to recover – and I don’t even know if it’d be the user’s local profile or the online (365) one…

Reply | Quote

Replies

Seems like you may have a corrupted user profile. See if there is anything at Corrupt User Profiles in Windows 10 that will help.

--Joe

Reply | Quote

Well yeah, in the user profile somewhere, exactly.

It’s just, this only seems to affect the MS Office applications, so would anyone have anything on how to fix this without recreating the entire profile from scratch?

Because, well, there’s lots of data in there, some of it important for business, and copying everything would risk copying the problem too.

And some people seem to just not believe me when I say that the Outlook Autocomplete cache isn’t a good place to store things…

Reply | Quote

Hi

Thanks for posting this issue.

I am experiencing a similar problem on one of 5 machines under my home based Office 365 subscription.

Every time I open Word or Excel on the problem laptop I am asked to verify the account and then there is a notice for me to sign in. No matter how many times I sign in / verify the problem re-occurs.

I have signed in and signed out many times, my access to One Drive is unaffected, my overall Windows 10 performance is good and I have uninstalled and then re-installed Office 365 – however all to no solution to the issue.

I recently loaded the latest Windows October update; other machines were updated at the same time yet with no apparent adverse impact.

To date I simply close / cancel all the warnings and the program seems to operate normally including access to files on the problem laptop and saved to the local hard drive.

However I am keen to solve the problem for good – these things normally get worse rather than get better!

Regards

Reply | Quote