Windows 10

Fix for Windows 10 2004 ‘Password Amnesia’ Bug

In troubleshooting a client’s computer, I ran across a workaround for a specific problem he was having: his computer would continually require him to re-enter his login information in Outlook for his email accounts; his Microsoft OneDrive required re-login daily, and his Adobe Acrobat Pro required him to re-login daily. No amount of troubleshooting seemed to make a bit of difference. For the record, here are some of the things I tried:

1. Check for updates and apply patches on all platforms.
2. Look for driver updates using manufacturing software programs.
3. Opened a ticket with the hardware manufacturer.
4. Performed a Windows 10 reset, while keeping his data. That of course required me to re-install his applications.
5. Performed a Windows 10 reset and wiped his data. We had backups, of course, and all of his critical data was in the cloud so all was good with restoring his data.
6. And on and on and on.

It got to the point where I was just about to throw in the towel, which is not something I like to do. But I didn’t; I kept looking, and finally, I found this blog post from ZDNet: Windows 10 Password Problems. As I read through the article, I was seeing the same problems that my client was having. Finally! An answer to the problem. Right now, the answer is a workaround, but this is what I did, per their instructions:

1. Until Microsoft delivers a fix, its recommended workaround involves right-clicking the Windows 10 Start Button and selecting Windows PowerShell (Admin).
2. Copy and paste the command below into Windows PowerShell and press Enter.
3. Get-ScheduledTask | foreach { If (([xml](Export-ScheduledTask -TaskName $_.TaskName -TaskPath $_.TaskPath)).GetElementsByTagName(“LogonType”).’#text’ -eq “S4U”) { $_.TaskName } }
4. If you see any Tasks listed from the PowerShell output, make a note of them.

Next, go to Windows Task Scheduler and disable any tasks you found from the above command.  Follow these steps:

1. In the Windows 10 Search box, type Task Scheduler and then open the Task Scheduler app.
2. Locate the task in the Window (HP Customer participation), or other task from the Windows PowerShell output.
3. Right-click the task and choose Disable.
4. After you disable the task, restart Windows.

After the reboot, I did have to provide login credentials again for all of the affected services, but so far, just the one time. I’m continuing tomorrow to see if it’s still fixed. The task that was the problem for me was the same HP Customer Participation that was mentioned over at ZDnet.

Fingers crossed!