If you’re in the EU, you qualify for free enrolment for Windows 10 Extended Support Updates (ESU). (Other territories may have to pay a fee). This is useful if you are running Windows 10 on hardware that won’t support Windows 11, or you just want to stay on Windows 10 for compatibility or other reasons.

Enroling is easy – you just go to Windows 10 Updates as usual, and you should see a warning that support for updates has failed. There’ll be an Enrol link you can click to sign up. The only condition is that you need to either create or use an existing Microsoft.com account when signing up. (This won’t take over your local login account on Windows 10; it’s only used for updates).

I did all of this two months ago on our main family computer and it was working well. Then recently, I fell foul of a well-executed phishing attack sent to my wife’s company and while nothing was compromised, I changed my Microsoft account password as a precaution.

Doing this apparently cancelled the extended updates enrolment on our family computer. Attempting to re-enrol prompted for my Microsoft.com credentials again, but this time after logging in, I received an error message saying:

Oops, something went wrong. It was probably our fault. Please try again

No matter how many times I tried, I received this message.

The solution turned out to be cached credentials. Visiting Control Panel -> Credential Manager -> Windows Credentials and scrolling down to the Generic Credentials section showed a saved entry for MicrosoftAccount:user=xxxx@yyyyy entry which matched my login details.

Editing and removing this entry entirely was sufficient to allow Windows 10 ESU enrolment to operate successfully the next time I tried it.