Make IE prompt to remember password, again!

I had saved a password in IE, for a website i regularly log in to. It is a shared supplier account, and for various reasons was changed recently. Unfortunately for me, on my Windows 8 PC at work, it was not prompting me to remember the new password, worse still, it was remembering the old password. Which i was not remembering to clear out, whilst also not remembering the new password. So you had IE not remembering, to remember to ask me to save the new password, and me not remembering to forget the saved password and not remembering the new password.

Needless to say it was getting confusing.

Being one of those annoying issues i had put it off until today, so i set about searching for how to resolve this situation.

The first few results in a popular but nameless search engine suggested it was simply a matter of deleting a registry key… but that this would also delete all the other saved passwords… i have something like 50 saved passwords so that was a non starter. Also, it turned out that method does not work on Windows 8.

Second, delete the current saved password from Credential Manager. I did that, thinking i was stupid not to have done that first. Sadly, whilst this deleted the old saved password, it did not prompt me to save a new password.

I found a great article on an MSDN blog about exactly my issue, except it didn’t apply to Windows 8.

Why vengeful lord, have you smote me with this password prompting hell?

So after another hour or so of searching various links i glanced down at my Windows Phone… it had occurred to me earlier that some of the saved passwords in my Windows 8 Credential Vault were indeed ones i had saved from my Phone.. could it be that simple? Surely the password prompt would also not appear on the phone?

Well, to my delight it did. Shortly after saving my password on the phone, it was also now saved, correctly on my Windows 8 PC.

Now, tell me that is not a reason to ditch your iPhone.

I realise this post is essentially useless to anyone who does not have a Windows Phone, but we WinPhone users are simple folk and need to find a reason to celebrate whenever we can.

Sadly the only thing i could find that worked reliably, was to bite the bullet and do a reset of IE, including personal data. This had the expected result of removing all saved passwords, but did result in every web page once again offering to save passwords.