I have run into this many times: my Gtalk password is stored in my email program (Thunderbird as an IMAP account) and my Gtalk password is stored in Adium, and every now and then, when I start my computer, Google tells me my password is wrong.

I can’t login to Gtalk, I can’t check my email. Accessing Gmail via the web interface works fine, so I know Google isn’t down, but every time I check mail in Thunderbird, I get a password error. I faithfully retype my password, only to have it reject it anyway.

Using Adium, I can logon to AIM, Yahoo, even LJ Chat (tho I don’t know why I ever would), but every moment or two, I get a password prompt. If I pull up the Accounts screen and try to manually connect, it gets to “Authenticating: 75%” and then hits me with another password box.

While I have no idea why this works, it does:

Quit/close your email client (Thunderbird, in my case) Quit/close your chat program (Adium in my case) Go to https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha Complete the captcha prompt there and submit the form Restart your email and chat clients – all should be well.

It would seem some of sort of authentication bug with Google. The captcha gets all of the services back on the same page.