Windows Live Writer – Error Accessing Local Post

I use Windows Live Writer 2012 running on a Windows 8 Pro machine to post my blog posts onto WordPress. In the past I have had no problems with doing this, but when I tried to write up a post yesterday I was stuck with the following error while trying to save a local draft.

Error Accessing Local Post. Unexpected error occurred while accessing local post (TargetInvocationException). Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.

Ok, so I tried to post directly to my blog without saving a draft. This presented me with the following error.

An unexpected error has occurred while attempting to log in:

The type initializer for ‘WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HttpRequestHelper’ threw an exception.

Well that didn’t work out either, So off to Google I go.

The first hit that I find is from surfing the EtHeR. This post is from November 2007 so I initially has hesitant to look at it as it was so old. Reading through this post I was directed to the MSDN blog Enforcing FIPS Certified Cryptography from 2005.

Navigating through the registry I found HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\FipsAlogorithmPolicy and noted that it was Enabled.

Once I disabled this setting (by changing the REG_DWORD Data value to 0, and restarting Windows Live Writer, I was able to save drafts and publish to my blog once again.

This certainly was a strange once and considering the age of the posts involved I am surprised that it still worked, and that it is still an issue in the first place.

@PCVirus_AU
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