In Sql Server Management Studio, when you connect to a server using SQL Server authentication, there is a checkbox "Remember Password". This is really really annoying and causing me great frustration. We have passwords which are very long and have numeric and alpha and symbol characters. They are easy to type wrong. As a developer, my workstation has been secured by other means. I wish to make use of "Remember Password" so that I can more quickly DO MY WORK. For months now, whenever our network connections were severed but we were connected already, the next time we tried to connect, the freakin password would be cleared out. This is like Alzheimer's Disease. So, I've learned not to attempt to connect again or execute queries or navigate around in the property tree. I just wait until transient network problem goes away. Then I make my next connection, of course I have to re-type this incredibly long password again, RE-check the "Remember Password" box, get connected, then quit Sql Server Management Studio. This seems to be the only way for it to truely REMEMBER it. Then I restart Sql Server Management Studio, reconnect, and voila, the password has already been filled in for me. NOW, however things are different. There are NO network transient problems. Instead what we have going on here is more like a child with Attention Deficit Disorder. SQL Server Management Studio is FORCING me to retype the password upon every NEW execution. I swear, sometimes when I encounter this problem it totally removes my ability to perform my work. Instead, I picture grabbing the developers who were responsible for making this tool by the neck and like a bobble-head doll, shake them until their head's roll off. That's how frustrating this problem has become for me. Of course, there's going to be some people who read this and chuckle.. well.. it is kind of funny how I've described my frustrations, but really I'd like to SOLVE the problem somehow without having to read ten tons of documentation somewhere ridden with superfluous jargon written by someone who'd rather spread words in a flower garden than get to the freakin' point. 
Does anyone know how to solve this problem? hmmm... perhaps I should change the password to an empty string? Yeah, that would be appropriate for this problem where Sql Server Management Studio has a zero memory retention skill (ADD), but.. oh... lest we forget, that would cause a security risk now wouldn't it?
Could you please file a defect report for this on http://connect.microsoft.com/sqlserver? Issues reported on the Connect site are automatically ported into our internal issue tracking system so we don't lose any of the information you provide there.
We run in a Windows Domain here at work, so for our day-to-day work we almost universally use Windows Authentication logins and we never have to explicitly provide a password to SQL Server. If you are running in a Windows Domain, IMHO that's the easiest workaround for your problem. This is also the safest route with respect to security - any saved password is a potential security threat. Note that even in workgroup environments you can use Windows Authentication with local Windows logins if Management Studio is running on the same machine as the server.
As another work-around to the problem, you can save off a copy of your local c:\Documents and Settings\{you}\Application Data\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Shell\mru.dat file. When management studio overwrites your saved password with an empty string like you describe, you could close management studio and then copy your backup mru.dat file over the more recent one. This will reset the saved settings of the connection dialog and other "most recently used" items in the UI to their saved values.
Management Studio does encrypt saved passwords, but no encryption is unbreakable. Be sure to restrict access to your saved mru.dat file to help prevent unauthorized access to your server.
Hope this helps,
Steve
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For the sake of followup I will mark thread as sticky.
Joe
Have you reported in the connect site as per Steve's reference?
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I actually don't understand, even as long as the description is, because I don't see this behavior at all.
Let me put in some very simple and straightforward things, as you've asked for.
Open Registered Server, create a new registration, check the save password box, and save the registration. From that point forward, you can ALWAYS right click on a registered server and select Connect | New Query or Connect | Object Explorer. I have NEVER seen it lose one of these passwords for any reason and I've done this in over 100 different customer environments, spanning a couple hundred different workstations.
Now, to the other part. If you are launching a query window from the object browser, the server has to be highlighted for SSMS to have a valid context to launch the query window against. If you launch a query window by using the New Query button and you get a dialog box to login, then it could not find a context, which means that you didn't have the server or a node underneath the server highlighted when you hit the button.
As far as the Remember Password checkbox in the connect dialog goes, I've never used it and have no plans at all to ever use it. I save everything in the Resgistered Servers, so I can always get to what I need without using this piece of the Connect dialog.
So, you wanted a valid workaround for any situation whatsoever, here it is. Use the Regsitered Servers task pane. If you have a query window open when you lose the connection, launch a new query window from the Registered Servers task pane, and then copy/paste the contents of the query window into the new one you just launched. It isn't pretty, but it will work 100% of the time.
|||This guy is completely right.
Let me explain how I first got to this forum.
For the last two years of using SQL Server Management Studio I have constantly been asked for my password whenever I leave my home and connect my laptop at work, or go home and connect my laptop to my home network.
Today was the breaking point for me, and I decided to type this topic into google and "get lucky".
Voila, here I am, and I can attest to this behavior of SSMS. I believe we're both addressing the issue concerning the login prompt when SSMS loads--not the "Registered Servers" pane.
It just behave like a kid with ADD and this behavior is so annoying it makes me pull my hair out and want to use Enterprise Manager, which I thought I would never say, but its true. At least EM saved my passwords...
The context switching is also very annoying.
I could rant for days about the UI fricition in SSMS, such as how the tabbed document layout's file names are so narrow in width that file names become unreadable, the MDI environment forces me to play the "resize window game", and how the summary name column gets resized to default every time you view a new object in the object explorer, but I'll save those bits for another thread.
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Here here!
I've had this problem myself ever since I started using SSMS. It's really obnoxious, because I love pretty much every other feature (except for the pummeling that DTS has undergone, but that's more a beef with SQL than SSMS), but this one bug alone has me very close to switching back to Enterprise Manager.
Any way, if you have managed to come up with a solution to this, I'd love to hear it. For me there doesn't even seem to be any rhyme or reason. It will remember my password for two or three connections, maybe four if I'm particularly luck, then spontaneously forget it again. And what's really awful is I'm regularly connecting to six or so different SQL servers, each with long, very strong passwords, that I have to go look up every third or so time I connect to them. I've just been dealing with it until today, when I finally broke down and decided that this was a stupid enough bug that there simply must be an easy fix for it. And after five pages of Google search results, I've drawn the conclusion that a lot of people seem to have this problem, but nobody has a fix for it.
Attention MS: Please please please please please fix this bug and release a patch!
|||Well, you can't use Enterprise Manager. It does not work against SQL Server 2005 instances. Don't know on the connection dialog when you launch SSMS. The very first thing that I configure is to launch SSMS into a blank environment so that I can choose what I want to do from there instead of always launching a query window. As for a workaround, that's 3 posts up, use the Registered Servers task pane.|||
Or Microsoft could just fix SSMS...
