I'm trying to transfer from my old Vista machine to my new Windows 8 one.

Everything stalled, most of the way through, with the following window:

Protected Content Migration



type the password for your old computer

The password that I use on the old computer when powering up or returning from screen saver does not work, nor do the two or three variations of my standard low-security password, nor do the obvious Password or hitting enter on a blank pw line.

Searching this forum, I found a post with an identical problem, back in 2008 when transferring TO Vista... but they did not get any answers.

On the new, Windows 8, computer.

But this problem is, from the web searching I've done, a long standing one with easy transfer, existing since at least as far back as 2008, when people were transferring from XP to Vista.

The transfer of everything "public" on the old machine went fine, the transfer of the stuff on the named library all failed. As far as I know, there is no password there, but if there is, it would almost certainly be one of the ones I tried, because I only use hardcore passwords on a very few accounts.

I can access the files on the old machine just fine, but I can't figure out how to get the old machine to cough up the password, or how to work around it.