In the past – I have mentioned a number of issues relating to Outlook prompting continuously for a password. This problem however can have a wide range of causes and I have found that a systematic approach to the issue is important. A recent incident with a client showed that identifying the machines and user affected by the problem can give an insight to whats causing the repeating password.
In this case we had resolved an issue with DNS which was causing the outlook 2003 and 2007 clients to prompt for password immediately that outlook was loaded. However a small core of machines continued to display a similar thought not identical problem. Have tested the reg patch above we were still left with a problem so we tried the alternative solution that I had come across recently with the loopback test
To Disable the loopback check
Follow these steps:
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlLsa
3. Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
7. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.
However in this case it had no effect. So when checking with the Network Admin I found that the machines affected were all Outlook 2007 and specifically the small business edition with BCM. By a process of elimination we were able to show that the problem was after initially creating a profile and entering the manual details for the account we were able to start Outlook with no password prompt. However when we closed and restarted Outlook (one or two times) the prompt appeared again. We found that the setting “Connect to exchange using http” was getting selected even though it was unselected when the profile was successfully created.
We explored some options in terms of turning off this option at the exchange mailbox level but this had no effect. The solution came when we removed BCM (as it wasn’t in use) and recreated the profile manually. Result = no password prompt. We repeated this on the remaining machines which worked as expected.