Hi folks,

I've spent the past four days trying to upgrade an Umbraco 7.3.4 installation to 7.12.3 (the current latest) so it can be converted to an Umbraco Cloud project. I've gone through many upgrade iterations now and have been upgrading to every release in sequence since 7.3.4, confirming it works, and taking a snapshot before upgrading to the next minor revision.

What I've found is that right at 7.7.0 authentication stops working. The AuthorizeUpgrade page is reached but the same credentials that work every time at 7.6.13 fail with the generic "Login failed for user [email protected]". If I roll back to 7.6.13 I can log right in again with the same credentials.

There are many, many post online indicating the same problem - login fails after upgrading to 7.7.0+. To date I've tried all of the solutions I can find online but still can't log in:

Method: Follow documentation in Umbraco's 'Version specific upgrades' section for 7.7.0

Result: No change.

Method: Triple-check password

Result: I wish it were that simple.

Method: Change password to one of the known hashes

Result: No change. I've tried every hash posted in Umbraco forums.

Method: Change useLegacyEncoding to true in Web.config

Result: No change.

Method: Check log file in App_Data/Logs

Result: No helpful information or stacktraces are logged even when the application returns 500 Internal Server Error (when attempting to reset password via Forgotten Password? link).

Method: Change userNoConsole to False in umbracoUser table

Result: No change. I've yet to see userNoConsole set to anything except false. failedLoginAttempts never increments.

Method: Update mailSettings in Web.config and reset password via Forgotten Password? link

Result: No change. I always get the error 'Request password reset failed for email [email protected]'.

Method: Recycle IIS application pool after updating Web.config or database

Result: No change. I'm running IIS Express via Visual Studio 2017 and have been faithfully exiting IIS Express when I happen to run instead of debug.

Method: Delete App_Data folder before each run

Result: No change except in performance.

Method: Upgrade to 7.7.13, then up to 7.10.4

Result: No change.

Method: Update the user's securityStampToken to a new GUID in the umbracoUser table

Result: No change.

Method: Change usernameIsEmail to false in umbracoSettings.config

Result: No change. My userLogin and userEmail are both my email address.

Method: Clear cookies and cache or use Incognito Mode

Result: No change.

Method: Remove 301 Redirect Url package

Result: No change. The package has not been installed on this site.

Method: Change database password to one without an ampersand (&) in Web.config's connectionStrings

Result: No change. Password is already one without any special characters.

Method: Add entries to umbracoUser2UserGroup for user

Result: No change.

Method: Change UsersMembershipProvider in web.config to a specific string (because the poster didn't note what changed)

Result: No change. This is the string that was posted:

<add name="UsersMembershipProvider" type="Umbraco.Web.Security.Providers.UsersMembershipProvider, Umbraco" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" minRequiredPasswordLength="10" useLegacyEncoding="true" enablePasswordRetrieval="false" enablePasswordReset="false" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" passwordFormat="Hashed" allowManuallyChangingPassword="false" />

Method: Start with a clean Web.config from the latest Umbraco version, compare against existing Web.config, and update accordingly

Result: No change. My changes are just setting the connection string and updating the mailSettings to spit emails to a local folder.

Method: Use Admin Reset dll

Result: I get to the "success" page but I don't see the password hash changing in the database and I still can't log in.

Method: Start over with a fresh database and fresh installation

Result: That's not an option for me - the existing website must be upgraded.

Any insight would be appreciated. I'm at my wit's end (at this point there's only one wit left).