Why is Groove asking me to change my password repeatedly after it was reset?

Hello! I have a client issue for you today. This one isn’t a bug, just a confusing situation that you can get into when you have an old Groove password reset.

Here’s the scenario. You have a Groove installation that you haven’t used for a while – or a saved Groove account that you’ve restored – and you don’t remember your password. You ask for a password reset, that goes through, and you receive a temporary password. Of course, you need to change that temporary password to one of your own, so you’re not surprised that Groove immediately prompts you to change your password. But after you fill out the fields and click OK, you get another Change Password dialog box, and when you put the same information in that, Groove returns an error which says that the password is incorrect.

This situation can arise when your Groove domain has a password expiration policy, and sometime during the period that you did not log on to Groove on this computer, your password became too old. When your password expires on a client, Groove Manager queues a password change prompt to send when that instance of your account next connects to the Manager. This contact doesn’t occur until you have completed the password reset procedure, so even though you have just reset your password, you still need to change your password again to satisfy this policy.

When you receive the second password prompt, the new password from the password reset is now your “Old Password”, and you must choose a new “New Password”.

This is one of those odd issues that is less of an edge condition than it might seem to be. You would need both to have forgotten your password and to not have used your account on that computer since the password expired, but people are more likely to forget their password when they haven’t used it in a while. It shows up often enough that I wanted to get this explanation out there, both for any readers who work for a helpdesk, and for the benefit of users who are experiencing the issue and searching the Web for an answer.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  This isn't a bug, just a problem that people encounter when they don't fully read (or don't fully understand) the prompts that are already provided. Support has requested that the lablels be modified slightly to make them clearer, but that's the sort of change that is usually reserved for new versions.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 16, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 20, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 11, 2009
  I am really surprised this hasnt been fixed or ducmented clearly

• Anonymous
  November 17, 2009
  It's not a Windows 7 issue.  I'm having the problem right now on Windows XP.  For some reason the system wanted my password this weekend.  All the usual suspects failed so I requested a password reset.  I enter the temporary password and am prompted for a new password.  Clicking OK has no effect; the password change window never goes away.