June 3, 2020

Outlook needs password but dialog box disappears

By Ajey Gupta Office 365, Technical 📒✍2 minutes to read 1 Comment

Outlook shows the “Need Password” in the status bar or keeps asking password again & again. When I click on it to enter the password, a dialog box appears for a second and then disappears. Along with that I also clicked “Type Exchange Password & Connect” option, dialog box doesn’t stays for password to enter.

This issue happened with one of my clients and I would like to share the steps I followed:

1. Try opening Outlook in safe mode by running Outlook.exe /safe and see whether the password window appears. Try entering the credentials if it appears.

2. Open Control Panel – Credential Manager, and try clearing the saved credentials. Close outlook and re-open to check the behavior.

3. Disable Modern Authentication on affected machine.

Open Run – Regedit and go to the location: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity.

Create a DWORD with the name EnableADAL and set it to 0.

Note: ADAL enables sign-in features such as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), smart card, and certificate-based authentication for Office client apps across different platforms.

4) Under the same registry key location, create a DWORD with name DisableADALatopWAMOverride and set it to 1.

Reboot the machine after making the above change as registry won’t refresh automatically.

The above reg key disables WAM (Web Account Manager) use in Office, which degrades the auth experience.

Note: On Windows devices, some of the security-related features are available exclusively via WAM and are otherwise not possible. Additionally, all future innovations will be implemented on WAM.

After following the above steps try opening Outlook and I hope the password window will be stable to let you enter the credentials. Once entered it will be saved and will show you Connected to Microsoft Exchange.

Thanks a ton for reading my above blog. If you have any comments, suggestions, or feedback please spare a second to post it.

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