Why I wasn't Able to Login into my WordPress User Account at all?

Today, I created a new post to publish to my blog at Easy Technical Blog . As I normally use Windows Live Writer to write all my posts offline, I wrote one today too and posted it as a draft on my above blog. It posted without a problem.

Then, as usual, I went to my blog and directly went to the admin area (I post as a normal user and my user password is normally saved in lastpass). I use Google Chrome as the browser. When I tried to login to the admin area with my username and proper password, I was brought back to the same login page without any error or message from WordPress. If the password was wrong, the username/password box vibrates for a few times when this happens but there was no such problem. This kept me wondering what had happened.

So, I opened an incognito window to login as the admin user to see what was the problem with my user account. I was able to login from the incognito window as administrator. I changed the password of the said WP user and again tried logging into that account but all in vain. And the strange thing was that WP wasn't telling me what the problem was, and not even giving me any error.

Next I tried logging with this user account from the incognito Window, but here too I wasn't able to login. However, I was able to login as the Wp admin. Now, I had another WP user already created. I tried logging in with that user account and the same thing happened. No error, no shaking login box, and brought back to that same page and empty login/password box!

I now created a new user, and made him an admin. But even this user wasn't able to login to the admin area. Very strange, wasn't it? So next what I did was, start Internet Explorer and login into the user account. And lo! I was able to login to the dashboard instantly! So, I understood that the problem must be with Google Chrome cache or cookies.

I cleared the cache first but that didn't help and I wasn't able to login still. Next I cleared the cookies and then tried logging in once again as the WP user and the problem was solved. About an hour of my time was wasted due to this problem. But a lesson learnt and just wanted to share this experience. If such a thing happens with any of you, try clearing the cookies and you should be able to login without any problems.

For additional safety, I have let the second admin account that I created in this process, remain. Just in case something happens and I'm not able to login with my normal admin account, I'll use this second admin account. But note that I do not have any admin user with the name "admin" - I've deleted that used after creating another admin user who no one can even guess. Also, I have very strong passwords for all user/admin accounts.

Even if this post isn't helpful now, it may save your time someday if you get into a similar problem.

Raspal