Clearing Cached Authentication Info in Windows
This comes up every now and then for me and I can never remember how to do it so I'm sticking it here to make it easier for me to find. The problem happens when I'm using Windows Explorer to open or browse a Windows share / Samba share / SMB mount point / etc. Windows Explorer has a tendency to cache the authentication information for the share and doesn't re-present the opportunity to provide authentication information in the event that the cached credentials have become invalid. This happened to me again today when the account I had used in the past had become disabled. You can find and clear the cached authentication(s) by doing the following:
Click Start, Run and type Control keymgr.dll
Remove the entries from the list
OR
Click Start, Run and type Control Userpasswords2
Click Advanced, Manage Passwords
The information is also in the Registry but these worked well enough for me to not go poking around in that rat's nest.
September 9th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Thanks for posting this. I wasn't able to clear the cached credentials through the registry (rights issues), the above commands worked like a charm.
June 25th, 2010 at 8:47 am
Thank you! I find myself having to do this about once a year, and I can never remember the details.