Cannot sign into Windows iCloud: get a pop-up with only a red circle with a white cross

I spent a few hours trying to reverse engineer what the issue is here with process monitor and eventually resolved it. The client certificate that iCloud uses to talk to the server appears to be getting broken in some way.

How I fixed it:

* certmgr.mmc, file->add/remove snap-in, certificates, my user account. There should be a certificate in Personal\Certificates with a Issued By of Apple iPhone Device CA. Delete it.

* In file explorer, go to %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA. There should be a folder with a name like S-1-5-21...or the like. Go in there.

* Backup this directory before messing with it.

* Open each file with Notepad, starting with the oldest one. You're looking for one that has the string APNSDaemon in it. Delete that one.

* Restart the computer and icloud signin should work now.

Thanks so much for everyone that contributed. This worked great! But I'd like to add the a little correction. In this part:

* certmgr.mmc, file->add/remove snap-in, certificates, my user account. There should be a certificate in Personal\Certificates with a Issued By of Apple iPhone Device CA. Delete it.

The correct command to run is: MMC This will bring up the Microsoft Management Console. Alternative you can run the command: certmgr.msc to get directly to the snap-in.

Oh and for me I had three certificate listed in the certmgr.msc and I seemed to need to delete all of them. To be precise, I deleted the first one in the list, and delete the file in the RSA folder, but still couldn't login, I went back to the certmgr.msc and saw the other two and deleted them and that did it.

Again, I can't thank you all enough for posting to this. I had been on the phone for hours with Apple support, and they did acknowledge the issue, but told me it would require an update. Who knows how long that could take.

I was able to fix this by deleting my Outlook profile (via control panel/mail) and creating a new one. It sounds odd but once I built a new profile and added my accounts, iCloud started working and the red X and all issues went away. I had this issue on multiple machines and the only fix was a new Outlook profile. Hope this helps someone.

I just deleted the file. I had quite a few files, fortunately user Jindong has written a script that will tell you which file has the "APNSDaemon" text in it.

This is the script - "Get-ChildItem -Path "$env:APPDATA\Microsoft\Crypto\" -File -Recurse | ForEach-Object { if (Get-Content $_.FullName | Select-String -Pattern "APNSDaemon") { $_ } } | Format-Table -Wrap".

Here is a link to the discussion. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254365463?answerId=258575857022&page=3

I realise this has been going on for some time. I recognise that this problem presents its self in a range of ways. The suggestions people posted on this particular thread has helped me so I wanted to add my findings here too.

I have downloaded and installed the iCloud app on my windows 10 computer but I get the error message "User ID or password incorrect" when I try to login with my Apple ID and my associated password. I have attempted to reset my password twice. I can loginto My iPhone 14 and the App store using these same Apple ID credentials, so I know they work. For me the problem is purely with the iCloud App on my Windows 10 desktop computer.

When looking into the suggestions by DoctorBrown and Bluesky_114 below somewhere along the way I got an error:

Which together with the suggestions in this post made think that permissions to access files needed for this app are not being handled correctly.

I went to: C:\Program Files\WindowsApps

I right clicked on the WindowsApps folder and selected Properties:

I clicked on the "Advanced" button.

I then got the screen below. The "Owner" was not set correctly so I clicked on the "Change" button

I got this window. I typed my user name in the "Enter the object name to seleect" text box then clicked the "Check Names" button. The correct User name then appears in the box.

I then clicked ok.

The owner name was now correct back on this screen below:

It is not shown in this screen capture since I had already actioned it, but there was a little check box under the owner name which asked if I wanted to propogate the ownership changes to all the child files and folders in this folder, which I did.

So the permissions were then propogated.

I see there is a similar box at the bottom of this window

Next I was trying to actually edit the permissions that I had as a user for this folder and everything in it. I clicked on my USer Name, but when I clicked edit, I got an error message saying that the entry was corrupt and that I should create a new one. I therefore clicked on the Principal setting which said BADWOLF/Users and removed it.

I then Clicked "Add".

Then clicked "Select a principal"

Then again typed my user name in the text box "Enter the object Name to select" and clicked "Check Names". The full user name then appears and I clicked OK:

I was then able to select basic permissions, in which I chose "Full control"

When I clicked OK the Principal appeared in the Permissions Entry table. I clicked enable inheritance, "Replace all child object permission entries with inheritable permssion entries from this object" and clicked apply.

I then got a window asking me if I wanted to continue:

I clicked yes.

The permissions are applied which takes about a minute or so.

I clicked OK to get out of each of the WindowsApps properties dialogue boxes.

I closed the iCloud App.

I couldn't open the iCloud app after all my messing around. so I restarted my computer

Further to my previous post, if you go back to version 13 of the iCloud for windows app you will be able to log back into your account. After that, you can update to the latest version from the Microsoft Store. If you log out of your account, it won't let you in again and you'll have to do that process over. Must be a bug in version 14.

I had an older machine with version 7.21.0.23 installed. I was able to find a copy of this older version, install it, and it worked. This fixed the problem for me. New version definitely has problems, not the least of which: if you're going to the trouble of showing an error box, at least have the decency to include some message text!

Here's a link to iCloud 13.4.9 which also works around this problem ... https://www.filehorse.com/download/file/WTSThe0crj7gpxjgYrjJFBJIvmfmpw25cWKFNYCXeYrzUey6P4J9s4xA7DtntiJf30qLyOlP7e62YBAKxn8oTBJPYGVTwO87mqP6EkPbhKU/

I think I have another step to workaround this issue. It looks like this issue is cause by issues with security. There can be multiple reasons the security config is messed up. I trust that someone with additional knowledge can verify this.

• Open a cmd prompt: WIN-R > cmd
• Enter the command:

wmic useraccount get name,sid

• You will see a list of the user accounts configured on your system. The string have a format of:

S-1-5-21-...xxx-500, S-1-5-21-...xxx-1002, etc.

The numbers before the last dash should all be the same for all the users. This is the SID's of the user accounts.

• Note the one for the name of the user that is logged in that can't login to iCloud.
• Open Explorer and go to the following folder:

%appdata%\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA

• I think you should see only one folder here that has the name of the SID determined above. If you see more than one, then move or delete the one that has a different SID. (I moved it to a Temp folder to make sure I could restore it in case this breaks something else.)
• Log off and log back on. ( not certain if this is really necessary.)

You also may need to do the steps described by hronk and scuba-fan.

I'm not an expert on Security, YMMV. Any corrections or comments are welcome.

Solution is to use the earlier iCloud app 12.xxxx vice 13.xxx

I was able to find an old version of Windows iCloud version 13.4.101.0 at the UpToDown website. I installed the older version and it worked straight away. Hope that helps

With the new data encryption in icloud, older versions cannot be used any more.

But the method described by hronk works and as J0hSe wrote, for me it was enough to delete the file in

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA.

Thanks barryh5, however, if you are referencing to going to %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA. There should be a folder with a name like S-1-5-21...or the like. open files and look for APNSDaemon and delete those files... I also did this.

I used hronk's instruction and it did not work.

But after that I delete only iCloud Outlook in standard Windows 10 settings without deleting iCloud. And after that everything working.

P. S. Additional good news: in current iCloud version you finally can change iCloud Drive directory!