I have been working on a Lync 2010/Win7 sign in issue with a user and have noticed an odd situation that I'd like an explanation for. With Lync 2010 you are able to ask the program to save your login credentials such that you do not need to enter a password each time you log in. My question is relating to /how/ exactly these credentials are stored on the computer, and how to remove them.
As I understand it, when you save the credentials within Lync:
1) A Personal Certificate is generated by the Communications Server and stored in the user's certificate store
2) A Generic Credential with the login information is added to the Credential Manager for the user
3) A cryptographic token of some kind is stored in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\S-1-5-21-*
Lync will try to use the Certificate to sign in first and if that fails it is supposed to try the credentials stored in the Credential Manager profile for the user (at which point a new certificate is generated and used to sign in). This seems like an elegant
and relatively user friendly solution.
The problem comes when you try to clear the cached credentials such that Lync asks you to enter the password again. During my testing I have (1) deleted the personal certificate from the Certificate store, (2) deleted the Generic Credential record from Credential
Manager and (3) deleted the folder created in the %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\ directory. However when I launched Lync again it happily signed into my account without prompting for a password even though seemingly all the officially-sanctioned storage locations
for this information were purged. If I go into the registry I can make Lync ask me for a password again by changing HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Communicator\SavePassword to 0, but this doesn't help with my question.
So where exactly is Lync storing this login information? It needs to be somewhere on the system since it's still logging in. The fact that all the official documentation I've seen doesn't seem to say anything about this is frustrating to me. I would greatly
appreciate any information on this issue.
Thanks,
Justin
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Lync 2010 v4.0.7577.4356
Windows 7 Enterprise w SP1 (x64) v6.1.7601