Update, October 2026 — the fix still works, the names have changed.
- SkyDrive is OneDrive. Microsoft renamed it in 2014 after losing a trademark case in the UK. Everything below that says SkyDrive means OneDrive today.
- OneNote 2013 is long out of support — Office 2013 reached end of support in April 2023. If you are still on it, that is the real problem.
- The actual fix is unchanged and still the right first move for any Office app that keeps asking for a password it then refuses: a stale cached credential in the Windows Credential Manager. The entries are still named
MicrosoftOffice<version>_Data:live:cid=…/…:orgid:…; delete the matching one and sign in again. Today you reach it via Control Panel → Credential Manager → Windows Credentials, or just runcontrol /name Microsoft.CredentialManager.- The journalling app mentioned at the bottom never shipped. Treat that paragraph as a 2012 time capsule, not an offer.
The text from here on is the 2012 original, unchanged.
Everything started (I believe) with me changing the password of the Microsoft LIVE account. Sometimes trying to stay on the secure side has some unplanned side effects… for me this was 2h hunting down a sync error that was the result with OneNote 2013. You can easily even find that creating a new OneNote notebook in SkyDrive is not possible.
If you google for this error “onenote needs a password to sync some of your notebooks 0xE0000024” you find all kinds of things. Mostly old stuff that was relevant pre Office 2013 release. I even tried some registry hacks but nothing helped.
But in general the solution was pretty easy: OneNote (or even Windows) has a cached version of my password. And it doesn’t help to re-login, sign out, delete the OneNote cache etc.
Simply go to Control Panel → User Accounts and Family Safety → Credential Manager.
There you will find Office’s own (!) cached version of the live account with a strange name like MicrosoftOffice 15_Data:live:cid=<someid>.
I deleted this, restarted OneNote and everything was fine again because I was finally asked to log in to Office again (and could enter the password) :)
UPDATE 10/24/13
As a user mentioned on a Microsoft forum, it worked for him if he deleted the account that has “Live” in its name — you can see it in the screenshot above as well. So in some cases OneNote seems to use this account for logging in.
An alternative to OneNote
I don’t like several aspects of OneNote and I am a software developer… so I did the only logical thing: I write my own journalling app. The first alpha version will be available soon and it will be much cleaner, easier and simpler to use (and also much cheaper).