I have an Office 365 subscription, and I am having problems signing into the desktop software.
- When I click the "Sign In" button, I am prompted for my username.
- I enter my company email address, and click "Next".
- Normally, at this point, I would expect to see a password prompt, but the dialog just disappears. Essentially, it's as if I had hit the close button.
Here are some other observations:
- I first noticed this after I had moved my SSD from one laptop to another.
- If I go to the Account options in the Office application, it tells me the product is activated. Clicking "Manage Account" takes me to office.com, where I am signed in with my company Microsoft account.
- I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the Office 365 applications multiple times.
Affected products:
- I have zero issues with any of the web based Office 365 apps, or logging into any Microsoft site.
- All desktop Office 365 applications seem to be affected.
- OneNote 2016 is affected.
- The "OneNote for Windows 10" application is NOT affected.
- The OneDrive desktop application is NOT affected.
My thoughts:
- This could be related to swapping the SSD to a new laptop
- I have not tried re-building my local Windows profile (this is a huge pain due to all the software I have configured)… but I can if need be…
Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide!
Edit: More information. I re-built my Windows profile, and I am now getting an error stating "Your computer's Trusted Platform Module has malfunctioned. If this error persists, contact your system administrator with the error code 80090034.". I updated the BIOS, with no effect. (I did not see specific drivers for TPM)
Best Answer
I figured out the solution, and it makes sense. This Microsoft article titled "DPAPI MasterKey backup failures when RWDC isn't available" indicates that when a domain user logs in for the first time, and can't contact a read/write domain controller, then DPAPI keys can't be backed up. I'm guessing Office365 uses DPAPI to store your credentials.
I am a remote user. When I deleted/recreated my user account, I was NOT connected to the corporate VPN, so Windows may not have been able to backup my DPAPI keys to the domain controllers.
Not sure where the TPM errors came into play, as (as far as I know) DPAPI doesn't use TPM... but it could have been a generic cryptographic error.
Solution was to set this registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Cryptography\Protect\Providers\df9d8cd0-1501-11d1-8c7a-00c04fc297eb\ProtectionPolicy = 1 (DWORD)