After watching the pop up urging me to upgrade my laptop to Windows 10 for the eleventh time, I took the decision to go for it.
I had changed my trusty 5 years old HP DM1 Z , which was loosing its battle against Windows 8.1 and was getting slower each day until it was beyond hope.
The new Acer 2 in 1 was, in comparison, amazingly fast.
The Windows 10 upgrade went really smooth. I had not installed much software in the Acer, so I thought the risk was minimum.
Anyway I made a full backup and then hit the “upgrade now” button.
After about 45 minutes, the shiny blue welcome screen background of Windows 10 appeared for the first time, showing my MS account full name and below, in a smaller font, my MS account mail address. So far so good.
I logged in and found all the apps in place, in fact everything worked fine, with the exception of the JRiver Media Center installation, which I proceeded to reinstall without any issues.
Then I joined my Homegroup and rebooted after an automatic update.
The blue welcome screen was back again, but this time it no longer showed my MS account name. It was my MS mail address what was shown instead. Twice in fact because, below it, the same address appeared in a smaller font.
After login in and checking out if everything was in its place I opened the user account panel in the configuration menu. My full name was gone: for MS I was just an email address.
I started googling for the issue and its eventual fix, thinking that since 14 million people all over the world had taken the upgrade path, it sould have already been solved by another geekier guy somewhere around the world.
After some days I realized that there was no solution in the web. In fact there were dozens of threads in Reddit, in several Windows support sites, in blogs and in the MS community forums that ranted about the ’email shown twice at login” or “username equal to email” issue and nobody seemed to have a clue about its cause or fix.
A couple of methods, that involved switching account from MS ones to local and then back to MS’s, proved to be disappointing since although they apparently solved the problem at first, it appeared again after one or two reboots.
Then I called tech support at MS for the second time in my life, the previous one was an unsuccessful attempt to unify my software licenses under a single MS account, a task that probed to be as impossible as the stunts of the MI movies, maybe more.
A recorded voice offered an appointment to receive a phone call from support in about five to six days. Well, I said to myself, there are millions going through this upgrade with more important issues than having your email address shown twice at login. So I waited for The Call.
The Call took place six days later, after I had finished breakfast. Expecting a sort of support guru that would enlighten me with it’s knowledge of all things Windows, I hurried to my study with the Acer and followed his instructions: unlog from your MS account, log with a local account and then relog with your MS account….
I didn’t want to ruin the support guy morning by telling him that this was useless, he had been very polite and of course he didn’t had a fix. I asked him what to do if this happened again. “Then”, he said “an eventual fix will come out via the automatic upgrades”….
I admired his faith.
To be honest, there were no real problems other than the aesthetic ones in the bug, I had been using the Technical Preview of Windows 10 for months in a virtual machine and never had a glitch. But virtual machines emulate a very specific hardware combination, so it is foreseeable that they would work better than the hodge podge of customized hardware combinations running all around the world. And actually it was a free upgrade.
I then took the decision to find a fix.
I googled several threads about the bug, exchanged mails with a lot of guys, some frustrated, others really angry.
Eventually I found a pattern: all the guys with the bug had MS accounts whose primary email alias had been changed from the original one at some time.
The registry is the place where Windows stores all its configurations and settings. It’s a large and confusing place worthy of a Borges tale. In fact it’s a mix of the Babel’s library with the mysterious object that appears in The Aleph. (I love J. L. Borges prose and verse, but I recognize that it’s an acquired taste).
I drilled through hundreds of registry keys and finally used a freeware registry scanner to find clues, which I guessed were previous email addresses long ago forgotten.
Except by MS.
I found that the registry stored all the email addresses that I ever had in many places, I was baffled.
It was while chatting with a couple of guys about the bug in a MS community forum that I told them what I had found. One of them suddenly had an idea.
Two days latter he sent me an email saying that he had found a registry key that showed his original MS account email mentioned as “oldmsaccountname”.
By that time I had created a brand new MS account with just one mail alias and the issue, for me at least, was gone. but I really wanted the explanation.
He then told me that, after backing up his registry, he had deleted the old account name key and rebooted.
And the bug was gone.
He was very happy, I also was exulting: we had solved the puzzle. We had beaten MS. I sent the fix to all the forums where I had asked previously and received salutes and thanks from a lot of unknown people.
My MS community profile now has a First Answer badge and 23 thanks from users all over the world.
Two days latter I received a mail from MS support:
“Dear Mirko Torrez Contreras:
A support thread you were following has been answered by Mirko Torrez Contreras. You’ll find the answer following this link.”
Borges admired Kafka.
I started reading Das Schloss (The Castle) a couple of days afterwards.
Mirko Torrez Contreras is a freelance Process Automation consultant who decided to go legit with all his software licenses for ethical reasons. He still hasn’t reach to a conclusion about whether this path is good for his mental health or not.
Image from http://www.freisagen.com/ (a Korean humour website)