Never Use Apps? Log In With Local Acct? Consider disabling WLIDsvc

If you use a Microsoft account for anything, stop now.

But if your intent is to use Windows 10 with a local account, and never log in to anything with a Microsoft ID, this might be of interest to you.

Owing to a nice little tool, SVCHost Viewer, that dencorso introduced me to a little while back (thanks again for that), I was going through my current list of running Windows 10 services, and one caught my eye:

wlidsvc

Enables user sign-in through Microsoft account identity services. If this service is stopped, users will not be able to logon to the computer with their Microsoft account.

I thought hmm, that sounds like a feature, not a problem!  Maybe this service is not actually needed on a system that never, ever logs in with a Microsoft ID.  

Sure enough, I stopped it and logged out/in with no problem.

It's hidden - it doesn't show up in Services.msc - so I dug into the registry and found its entry:

[ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Services \ wlidsvc ]

Change the Start REG_DWORD value to 4 (which is Disabled), and voila, it never starts.  And you can still log into Windows with your local account just fine!

Edit:  I may have misspoken above.  It appears this actually DOES show up in the services.msc list as:  Microsoft Account Sign-in Assistant

Privacy bonus: 

The system no longer appears to attempt to contact Microsoft servers at addresses 131.253.61.x at logon even when you log on with your local account.

Warning:  If you use a Microsoft ID for accessing anything in Win 10, I don't know whether disabling this service will break something for you.  I suspect it will and it may even leave you with no way to recover.  I have ONLY tested this for a short time on a virtual machine that only logs in via a local account and has ALL Apps removed, and which I can easily revert to a time prior to making this change.

-Noel

Thanks for sharing I will have to give this a try when I get out of work. I have a few things I want to test with this concept.

Verified! Works nicely.

VM: W8 Build 10565 

Created 2 user accounts one local and one Windows Live

Logged into both 

Opened and Setup the Mail App (Windows Live Account) worked fine

Logged into my local account changed the Start registry entry to 4

Logged in to my Windows Live account (I assume it worked because a local profile was created when I logged in the first time)

The Mail app would not work error code: 0x80070426

Just for laughs I tried to login with an alternate Windows Live account it failed

I reset the registry entry and everything started working again.

Cool, thanks for the additional info and confirmation.

I really like that Disabling this service has shut up one of the few remaining attempts Windows 10 makes to try to contact online servers.  It never succeeds, because of my firewall setup, but not trying is better than having it try and fail.  Because of the firewall status logging I know exactly what communications it's attempting.

Tinfoil, hell - my hat is 3 inch thick titanium over steel with explosive armor.  :-)

-Noel

OK, I can confirm that this service was the sole source of connection attempts to 131.253.61.x, which is apparently a bank of Microsoft logon servers.

Privacy aficionados note:   It was attempting contacts with the above mentioned servers even though I exclusively log in with a local account, and don't even use a Microsoft ID to log onto things on that test system with a web browser.

Even better news:  I've found and disabled the equivalent service in Windows 8.1: 

Microsoft Account Sign-in Assistant

Enables user sign-in through Microsoft account identity services. If this service is stopped, users will not be able to logon to the computer with their Microsoft account.

-Noel

For the sake of Se7en users, the above might be applicable to W7 systems if you've ever installed Windows Live Essentials 2011 or the Bing Bar.

Nice but can't use. I have 2012 Essentials and it connects to my 2 accounts and Hotmail Ive had for a very long time.

But I got a email in Hotmail yesterday saying I needed to updrade to W10 and use the mail in it. excuse me. it didn't accept my 3 accounts and also wanted me to have a microsoft account which took over my User when I tested that. No thanks

Off to work on reinstalling Thunderbird then maybe I can disable another service.

TBird installed and wlidsvc disabled and all is good. Can send and receive on Hotmail. Reason I think because it uses my Inet provider server for the SMTP.

Always had heck getting all 3 of my accounts working in Tbird so I had left it a couple years ago and went to Live Essentials. Had heck again with SMTP and it was easy fix this time.