O365 Prompting for credentials across multiple clients. Not Connecting.

[thecomputerguy]

I have multiple clients now across different internet connections, offices, etc that are all experiencing a similar issue which is when Outlook 2013/2016 is opening it will hang on "Loading Profile". Then prompt for credentials, then the correct credentials are entered and it asks over and over again for credentials.

I have spent hours trying to troubleshoot this with multiple clients over the past few weeks. With some a reboot fixes the issue, then it will return the next day, or the day after. I've tried re-creating profiles, I've tried full re installs of Office, the issue comes back after a day or two.

The one consistent factor that I have in all of the computers with this issue is Kabuto+Emsisoft. All of the computers are running the same AV but shutting down Emsisoft doesn't fix it either.

The reason I'm leaning to Emsisoft still being the issue is because they released some large update 2-3 weeks ago that caused CHAOS for me. Clients using Eaglesoft experienced frequent hourly disconnects (SQL). Clients using Sage experienced frequent hourly disconnects (SQL). IE was unable to go to some secure websites (i.e. unionbank.com) and BETA updates had to be enabled on each individual user to fix that issue.

I have no idea what the hell they did but all of the above issues started after some large update, and all of the above issues were fixed after Emsisoft was uninstalled and those computers are currently unprotected until I figure out what I'm going to do. I've wasted countless hours trying to keep Emsisoft on the system while fixing issues because have 250+ clients on Emsisoft but I'm about losing my mind and I'm thinking it's also causing this Outlook Office 365 issue.

Any clues?

 

[thecomputerguy]

Other wierd thing is I have clients who use Outlook + Office 365 + Emsisoft who I haven't heard are having issues.... YET.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Working on one right now where a reboot fixed the issue. You can see it's fixed because when you open Outlook it does not hang on "Loading Profile" it goes straight to "Processing" and then opens right up ... no password prompt.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Here is a post I made on the Emsisoft Forums:

https://support.emsisoft.com/topic/30034-eam-extremely-problematic-since-108-update/

I could be completely off base by blaming Emsisoft but it seems far too coincidental.

 

[HCHTech]

Stuff like this keeps me up at night. If BitDefender ever has a problem like this, I am NOT going to have a good day (or week), that's for sure. It's the worst of all possible worlds. You get stuck with a TON of nonbillable work, you risk your clients losing faith in your solution, and the time trying to put out the fire causes all of the rest of the work to fall behind.

Good luck - keep us posted.

 

[Markverhyden]

@thecomputerguy you mentioned O365. Is this hosted Exchange? If so, are the providers the same or different. While this password thing happens on occasion, even with my own email server, I've only seen it constant once. One customer of mine has their's through Godaddy and had this happen twice in the last couple of years. Constant PW requests. Both times a call to Godaddy resulted in L2 support waving their wand to fix it.

 

[GTP]

Have you tried contacting Emsisoft directly? support@emsisoft.com
Grab the logs (C:\Program Files\Emsisoft Anti-Malware\Logs) and send it/them so Thomas can get a clearer picture of what's going on.

Hmmm. I've got a couple of hundred EAM users as well.
About 2 dozen or so clients using Emsisoft with everything from Office 2007 to 2016, O365, Thunderbird, Outlook (standalone), eMclient, and a few other mail clients. I have not had any issue you describe.

Have you tried whitelisting office?

 

[thecomputerguy]

@thecomputerguy you mentioned O365. Is this hosted Exchange? If so, are the providers the same or different. While this password thing happens on occasion, even with my own email server, I've only seen it constant once. One customer of mine has their's through Godaddy and had this happen twice in the last couple of years. Constant PW requests. Both times a call to Godaddy resulted in L2 support waving their wand to fix it.

It's hosted exchange with MS and Godaddy. Both services same issue.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Have you tried contacting Emsisoft directly? support@emsisoft.com
Grab the logs (C:\Program Files\Emsisoft Anti-Malware\Logs) and send it/them so Thomas can get a clearer picture of what's going on.

Hmmm. I've got a couple of hundred EAM users as well.
About 2 dozen or so clients using Emsisoft with everything from Office 2007 to 2016, O365, Thunderbird, Outlook (standalone), eMclient, and a few other mail clients. I have not had any issue you describe.

Have you tried whitelisting office?

I actually haven't because that sounds ridiculous but I will try it.

 

[Alex Smith]

Odd question, but are these clients using the same ISP? Its possible that is why you are having issues with multiple clients accessing content from similar internet sources while others outside your area are not seeing this issue.

Do things work fine via the Outlook web client?

 

[thecomputerguy]

Odd question, but are these clients using the same ISP? Its possible that is why you are having issues with multiple clients accessing content from similar internet sources while others outside your area are not seeing this issue.

Do things work fine via the Outlook web client?

OWA works fine ... ISP's are varied. Some Frontier, Spectrum, and ATT in there.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Dealt with another one today ... this one was quite interesting actually. Same issue as stated above ... trying killing Emsisoft and it still wasn't connecting. Turned off cache mode and then Outlook wouldn't open at all. I took that as an opportunity to try and troubleshoot further.

INTERESTINGLY ... the computer also could not reach https://diagnostics.outlook.com/#/?env=ExRCA either in chrome or IE. I was trying to avoid rebooting so I could further troubleshoot but now it was looking like a DNS thing. So I rebooted their DC which is their DNS server and did a logout and log back in on the user computer. Outlook opened and connected fine after that.

Unfortunately I'm still not sure if it was the logoff/logon or rebooting of the DC that did it but that computer can now reach https://diagnostics.outlook.com/#/?env=ExRCA

Also puzzling is that some of my users with this same issue don't have an onsite DC they are just standalone workstations. So ... maybe I'm getting further along with this possibly being some sort of DNS issue.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Well ... DNS wasn't the issue ... working with another one with the same issue ... Logon/Logoff is what did it.

 

[AlexCa]

Don't know how to solve your issue but I can share my experience... I usually see that happening when the user connects to a different network while having Outlook open. Example: the user have the laptop connected with cable, and he disconnects the cable to take the laptop to a meeting; the laptop automatically connects to the wireless network and Outlook will prompt for the credentials. But in that screen, I need to select "Choose another account" (or something similar), and insert domain\user and the password. If I don't do that and simply insert the password, I get the same problem (asks over and over again for credentials). If this doesn't work, usually a logoff/on will do the trick. In recurring cases, from what I remember (because those were rare), cleaning the credential manager usually worked.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Don't know how to solve your issue but I can share my experience... I usually see that happening when the user connects to a different network while having Outlook open. Example: the user have the laptop connected with cable, and he disconnects the cable to take the laptop to a meeting; the laptop automatically connects to the wireless network and Outlook will prompt for the credentials. But in that screen, I need to select "Choose another account" (or something similar), and insert domain\user and the password. If I don't do that and simply insert the password, I get the same problem (asks over and over again for credentials). If this doesn't work, usually a logoff/on will do the trick. In recurring cases, from what I remember (because those were rare), cleaning the credential manager usually worked.

I've also cleared the credential manager on most systems... all Systems are are desktops unfortunately ... I'm going to try and dump Emsisoft on a few and see how that goes.

 

[DMC Unlimited]

I have multiple clients now across different internet connections, offices, etc that are all experiencing a similar issue which is when Outlook 2013/2016 is opening it will hang on "Loading Profile". Then prompt for credentials, then the correct credentials are entered and it asks over and over again for credentials.

We ran into a similar issue recently with users of retails versions of Outlook 2016. One of the weirdest things I've seen. It ultimately turned out that if the user had created a Microsoft Account to register their copy of Office with the same domain address that was configured in Outlook - but that domain was not hosted by Office 365 - it would refuse to connect and prompt for the password constantly.

To better clarify, this client had their e-mail account user@mydomain.com hosted by a 3rd party hosted Exchange service (local ISP) and had purchased Office 2016 (retail). They had created a Microsoft Account at the time of purchase to associate this license to (using the same user@mydomain.com e-mail address). All had been working fine for months until recently when the aforementioned login prompt began to appear. Through no small effort, we found that it was due to this non-Microsoft hosted domain e-mail address being attached to a Microsoft Account. We were able to login to the Microsoft account and create an alias to a different e-mail address (user@hotmail.com) and make that the primary address on the MS account. This immediately resolved the issue. We've had this occur with multiple clients in the past month out of the blue. This may not directly relate to the issue you're having, but it sounded similar enough that I thought I should share this. We were losing our minds trying to figure out what was happening.

 

[thecomputerguy]

We ran into a similar issue recently with users of retails versions of Outlook 2016. One of the weirdest things I've seen. It ultimately turned out that if the user had created a Microsoft Account to register their copy of Office with the same domain address that was configured in Outlook - but that domain was not hosted by Office 365 - it would refuse to connect and prompt for the password constantly.

To better clarify, this client had their e-mail account user@mydomain.com hosted by a 3rd party hosted Exchange service (local ISP) and had purchased Office 2016 (retail). They had created a Microsoft Account at the time of purchase to associate this license to (using the same user@mydomain.com e-mail address). All had been working fine for months until recently when the aforementioned login prompt began to appear. Through no small effort, we found that it was due to this non-Microsoft hosted domain e-mail address being attached to a Microsoft Account. We were able to login to the Microsoft account and create an alias to a different e-mail address (user@hotmail.com) and make that the primary address on the MS account. This immediately resolved the issue. We've had this occur with multiple clients in the past month out of the blue. This may not directly relate to the issue you're having, but it sounded similar enough that I thought I should share this. We were losing our minds trying to figure out what was happening.

Interesting ... that's quite the dilemma you had there. Unfortunately for me, I don't think it's the same issue ... All users have Office 2016 + O365 Exchange purchased through the admin portal at Office 365. I'm still pointing the finger at Emsisoft here ... I've uninstalled Emsisoft on a small batch of computers and left them naked for the time being and I have asked the users to report back to me.

I've already had to remove Emsisoft off 15+ computers because of massive SQL issues since Emsisoft's update 3 weeks ago. The factors all of these computers have in common is Windows 7 + Office 2016 + Office 365 (MS/Godaddy) + Emsisoft.

I've called MS and I got the run-around there. They had no idea what was going on and once I rebooted the computer and created a new profile they proclaimed it fixed. I have a strong strong feeling the reason why I can't find any information on how to solve this and why MS can't help me is because it is not a wide-spread issue. There is something very quirky going on here and given how quirky and sesitive Emsisoft is I'm really leaning towards it being the cause.

 

[GTP]

given how quirky and sesitive Emsisoft is

I've not found it to be "quirky" or "sensitive" at all. I'm sure there would be many on here like me that also use Emsisoft in similar scenarios to yours and would disagree with your assumption that Emsisoft is "the cause."


Have you contacted Thomas Ott at Emsisoft support?
The logs would reveal if Emsisoft was indeed the cause.

 

[thecomputerguy]

I've not found it to be "quirky" or "sensitive" at all. I'm sure there would be many on here like me that also use Emsisoft in similar scenarios to yours and would disagree with your assumption that Emsisoft is "the cause."


Have you contacted Thomas Ott at Emsisoft support?
The logs would reveal if Emsisoft was indeed the cause.

I would consider Emsisoft 1.) Shutting down SQL connections 2.) Requiring to manually select beta updates to fix a problem with IE connecting to sites 3.) Possibly blocking O365 Exchange connections 4.) Blocking things like running LMI rescue on client PC's while showing a popup to allow it to run for less than 2 seconds "Wait I think this is Safe" .... 5.) When blocking sites displaying a page cannot be displayed instead of telling you that Emsisoft blocked the website ... Quirky.

 

[GTP]

With all due respect, I don't want to turn this into a pissing contest.
All your concerns could be allayed by simply contacting Emsisoft, which you seem hesitant to do.
...anyway...
1. Never had that happen.

2. ?? Really don't understand this but begs the question why are they still using IE? I've never seen this behaviour with any client using IE/EAM in combination.

3. Never had this either and is still unconfirmed in your case.

4. I don't use LMI Rescue, but also begs the question why EAM would put up an alert on LMI. Doesn't happen with Teamviewer, but yes, I agree that's a pain. But the good news is you can adjust that timeout.

5. Have you confirmed that it was actually Emsisoft that blocked the page and not Windows "SmartScreen?" or Defender?

Further, imo, the only reason EAM would block a webpage is because it was deemed to be malicious in some way, in which case you should be grateful for the intrusion.

That is all. I'm out.