I don’t use ooVoo. But being the parent of a teenager, and being the tech support guy of the house, I have to deal with funky software issues that pop up. Among them was ooVoo, a video chat software that is comparable to Skype.

My son uses Skype and ooVoo to talk to his friends from school, and the other day he was getting an issue where no matter what he did it would give an error “Failed to Sign in”. I looked up the ooVoo site and followed their KB article on trying to resolve the problem (updating to the latest version, making sure the Windows Firewall was properly configured to allow the app through, etc.). Nothing worked, and Google searches showed this to be a common issue, and ooVoo support always points people to the same KB article (even though some have said that it didn’t work for them).

Now, I don’t know if this was coincidence or what, but the following appeared to resolve the issue for me (after an hour of getting “Failed to Sign in”, I performed the following steps and was able to get in right away). Keep in mind this is running on a Windows 7 machine.

• Exit out of ooVoo completely if it is running (right-click on it in the system tray by the clock and select Exit).
• In the Windows Explorer, go to C:users{user}AppDataRoaming, where {user} is the account you are currently logged in to (example: John)
• You should see an ooVoo related folder here (maybe something like “ooVoo Details”). Right-click on this folder and select Rename. Change the name to something like “ooVoo Details.old”.
• Relaunch ooVoo and re-enter your username and password.

In my son’s case, he got right in.

Possibly just a coincidence, but I figured that I’d share.