Electrum password issue

[eirero]

Hi,
I'm new here. Please forgive any mistakes of etiquette 

I'm having a problem with using my Electrum client. I encrypted it with a password using the windows screen keyboard, which Electrum accepted. I used numbers letters and symbols. However since the encryption it wont accept the password.
Trying to send bitcoins and filling in the password a dialogue box pops up saying:

'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa7' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

I know the character referred above is a §.
Can someone please assist me in resetting my password or figuring out what to do to reaquire access?

Regards

eirero

[DannyHamilton]

I've re-posted your issue to the Electrum Forum.  Hopefully someone from there will reply here for you.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189821.0

[Tachikoma]

I am not sure how to prevent the issue from happening but what you can do is restore your wallet from the seed.

For this to work you do require your seed, which you should have gotten when you created the wallet. If you have it do the following.

Go to Start->run and paste in %appdata%

The explorer should open and you should see an Electrum folder. Check this folder for an electrum.dat file, rename this file to electrum.dat.old.

Now boot Electrum again and choose restore. Enter the twelve words and submit it. Your wallet should be generated again. Now choose a password without the character that gave you trouble and you should be ready to go.

[ThomasV]

thanks for the bug report.

for now you can either you restore from seed, or set use_encryption to False in your wallet, in the console:
wallet.use_encryption = False

(the bug set it to True, even though your seed was not successfully encrypted)

[eirero]

Thank you ThomasV. I used the console to do as you described and it worked out fine for me. I reset my password.

I'd like to ask. Is this not a security threat. I mean, can't anybody reset my password like this?

[ThomasV]

Thank you ThomasV. I used the console to do as you described and it worked out fine for me. I reset my password.

I'd like to ask. Is this not a security threat. I mean, can't anybody reset my password like this?

no, wallet was not encrypted at all. it's a bug, that will be fixed in the next release

[DannyHamilton]

Thank you ThomasV. I used the console to do as you described and it worked out fine for me. I reset my password.

I'd like to ask. Is this not a security threat. I mean, can't anybody reset my password like this?

I think that the point is that (due to the use of a character in the password that the program failed to properly recognize), the data was never encrypted in the first place.  Unfortunately, even though the data wasn't encrypted, the "wallet.use_encryption" indicator was still set.  Therefore the wallet "thought" that it needed to decrypt the data before it could use it.  When it asked you for a password, it tried to use that password to decrypt data that wasn't encrypted in the first place.

By changing the value of "wallet.use_encryption", you didn't "reset your password", you just let the wallet know that it wasn't actually encrypted.

[eirero]

I thank you for helping out with the previous bug. I do however have a new issue.
When i click on the Electrum ikon, to start the program nothing happens. The program doesn't open.
It's installed on my usb drive and I pulled it out of the socket before I closed the program.
After reinserting it I cant get it to start.

I get this dialog box message now:
Error loading Python DLL: C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\_MEI3882\python27.dll (error code 5)

Should I re-install Electrum or would that delete my bitcoins?

Can someone help me get my Electrum running again?

[Rayen]

Make sure you have a backup of your wallet.dat before uninstalling.

[Rayen]

Or you could download python27.dll from the internet and copy it there C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\_MEI3882\

[eirero]

Rayen.
 I downloaded python and copied it to the MEI3882 library, but it wont start and there's no pop up now?
What do I do?

[flatfly]

No idea, but I guess you will get more attention for your issue once you are able to make a post in the electrum subforum.

[eirero]

It keeps changing temp directories from differing MEI######? library numbers

[eirero]

I fixed it. I Installed Electrum portable, restored with seed and it's working fine again.

[eirero]

Can someone explain what makes Electrum Portable portable?

[eirero]

Every time I run Electrum Portable I have to restore with my seed. Why is that?

[Tachikoma]

It makes it portable because it saves all related files in the folder you open it from.

If you copy it to a usb disk and open it from there it will save your wallet and header files to said usb disk.

[eirero]

It makes it portable because it saves all related files in the folder you open it from.

If you copy it to a usb disk and open it from there it will save your wallet and header files to said usb disk.

Thank you for the explanation