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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 2:21 pm and is filed under General, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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