Yahoo Messenger oddity

[garydd]

Today I tried to sign into Yahoo messenger and I kept getting an error message "Invalid username or password". I got scared and went into yahoo to change my password and I did. But I tried logging in with that new password into yahoo mail and messenger and still the same error message "invalid username or password".

I changed the password a few times and kept trying but it wouldn't accept any password I made, like the password kept automatically changing itself to some unknown password or just not accepting the valid password. I exited yahoo messenger and tried yahoo mail again and I could enter yahoo mail. I also re-installed yahoo messenger and then I could sign into yahoo mail but when I used my username and password for yahoo messenger, it wouldn't sign in and said (invalid username or password) but it would sign into yahoo mail now just fine with that username and password, just not messenger. No person could have been online changing my password because I used a status checker and it said my username was "offline". Then I tried to sign into yahoo messanger with that username and password, and it did, then I signed out and tried again to test it and then I got the "invalid username and password" message again, then tried again and it worked again; things like that. Some of the time when I tried to sign into yahoo messenger with the username and password, it opened a new window (a yahoo login page similar to what you would see in yahoo mail). When I logged in, it showed the Messenger 8.1 download page. Why?

I had smiley central on my computer for maybe a month or two but got rid of it an hour ago wondering if it gave yahoo messenger a worm. Worms can change passwords? Also note that I opened my account and no one changed anything like no one ever entered my account but me. So no one must have changed the password.

My computer had no viruses or spyware. Does Yahoo sometimes have problems and gives you an error saying Invalid username or password when in reality, you entered a valid one? Now it works just fine. What happened?

Edit:

I did some reading and someone had a similar problem in July with a phone and getting that error message even though he was entering the right password and they said something like yahoo having problems with passwords that have special characters in them and my password has a special character. What's up? Does anyone know what happened? Has anyone else here had the same problem? It scared me a lot and my first guess was that someone changed my password using spyware to find out about it. But I have no spyware.

[EmotePad]

I have special characters in my password too. I cannot log in through any of Yahoo's services that use a web-based interface. Thankfully, I can still log in using the Messenger chat client, and have enabled the option to let it pass my username and password to the Yahoo email servers. So I can get to email okay. The bad thing is, I can't change my password to remove the special characters. To do that I need the web-based interface to accept special characters.. which they no longer do.

This seemed to start when the chat rooms were re-opened and the captcha verfication code requirement was initiated. Making do sa far.

[aneagle]

I got same problem today. I tried to login using Pidgin and got a hint from Pidgin telling me to try login from web so after I login for Yahoo mail I can get Yahoo messenger working again.

[garydd]

So it is safe to say that "invalid username and password" errors is nothing to worry about?

[Oreo]

I'm getting the same problem with ONE of my Yahoo! Messenger accounts. The others are working just fine. Earlier I was able to sign into Y!mail and get onto chat that way...currently I can sign into Y!mail but now the chat won't load. It's just for THAT account...my others are working just fine and it's only the chat portion of the account. My guess is that there's a server problem with the server that contains that one account of mine and I'm guessing your account as well. I guess we have to wait until Yahoo! figures out what's going on.

[garydd]

It has worked for me ever since I had the problem yesterday and the problem stopped yesterday. I assume when you say "chat" you mean "yahoo messenger". When it wasn't working, I was very scared and thought someone changed my password and got a hold of my old password using spyware, but my anti spyware program detected no spyware and the only spyware I had was in quarantine already. So I kept changing the password and even sometimes when I immediately tried to sign into yahoo mail after I provided the secret question to change the password and yahoo sent me an auto generated password so I could sign in and choose my own password, the auto generated one wouldn't work like it should have. And sometimes I could only get as far as choosing my own password but then it wouldn't work. Then I could use a password to sign into yahoo mail but not messenger.

But it has worked fine today and I hope it will continue to.

[Yahooligan]

Yahoo was having issues with their login process. I'm not sure why or what happened, but I know some Trillian users were also having trouble logging into Yahoo.

Hopefully it's resolved now?