Incorrect password - except it isn't

About 1 time in five when we turn on my wife's PC (Dell Precision 3430), it refuses to allow anyone to login - saying the password is incorrect. Neither Num-Lock, nor Caps-Lock are on when this happens. This is a recently installed machine which was running version 1903 and was upgraded yesterday to 1909. Problem just happened again earlier this evening.

Simplest way to get out of this is to just re-start the machine and it then works just fine! If it's of any relevance there's an icon at the right hand end of the password entry field that looks a bit like an eye - but it doesn't appear to do much.

Any thoughts on what might be causing this problem?

Thanks
David

If you click and hold on the eye icon it should show you what has really been typed.

I think you should try a different keyboard or clean out crumbs by dropping it upside down as it's probably a sticky key.

The simplest solution is to change the password and double-check the characters used - upper / lower case letters. Zero (0) isn't an capital O, 1 (one) isn't an capital I. Shift key gives you a character instead of a number.

This isn't us getting the password wrong, it is Windows refusing to accept the passwords for any/all users on the system

Can you click and hold the eye icon to display the typed password before hitting enter?

perdrix said:

This isn't us getting the password wrong, it is Windows refusing to accept the passwords for any/all users on the system

Thus why I say change the password. That said the issue sounds odd as password acceptance is either go or no-go. Never heard of Windows sometimes accepting a password and sometimes not where the password is supposed to be correct. It's either go or no-go.

perdrix said:

This isn't us getting the password wrong, it is Windows refusing to accept the passwords for any/all users on the system

Click the 'eye' icon to see in plain text what you have typed as the password. Sometimes if you have more than one keyboard layout available (eg. US and UK English) you may find the default keyboard language is not correct on the sign in page. This would change the keys for characters such as #, £, $ and " and cause problems if any of those are in your password.

If you have multiple keyboards available, you can choose which to use at the sign in screen with WinKey+Space.