Monday, September 19, 2011

Stop annoying password prompt dialog from Outlook in windows 7

From last week, my outlook 2007 started popping up a dialog asking for username and password while trying to receive POP3 emails from Yahoo small business email servers. The annoying dialog may pop up as frequent as the Send/Receive frequency set in Outlook (in my case every 3 minutes) and it will pop-up again even if the correct username/password is entered and saving the password is checked in the dialog.


I did an investigation and this method seems to work, at least for me. The steps are summarized below:
  1. Close/kill outlook.
  2. Type the following in Start->Run (Windows+R key) or search box
    %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Protect\
    A explorer window will pop up showing the contents of the above folder
  3. Look for a folder named as the SID of the logged on user (starting with something like S-1-5-21-) and rename it by appending .old or -old to its name.
  4. Start outlook and enter the username/password when prompted (check to save the passwords by outlook) and the above folder will be recreated.
  5. Sit back and relax.

1 comment:

Sankar said...

This did not work for me. Same problem persisted. I plan to call Yahoo tomorrow and ask for help.