[Macworld.com]

Mac forever prompting you for once-memorized passwords? Look to your keychain. [more]

[kwill]

Note: Keychain First Aid not available in 10.3.x.

[JMStafford]

I've found that that sometimes this will occur if ~/Library/Safari/Form Values or~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist is corrupted.
I've also found that in a Sync (w/Entourage, Plaxo, iTunes) that sometimes Address Book doesn't see "Me" as "Me" and then my AutoFill doesn't work.

[hayesk]

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Note: Keychain First Aid not available in 10.3.x.

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From http://docs.info.app...l?artnum=107234

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System requirements
Mac OS X 10.1 to 10.2.8
Note: For Mac OS X 10.3 or later, Keychain First Aid is already built into the Keychain Access application. See article 152252 for more information.

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[ODS]

The Keychain repair is a good first step. However, Your eMail provider may be rejecting your password. After many hours with AT&T/Yahoo! support, we rebuilt all of my mailboxes at the server and on client end, changed passwords back and forth, and made numerous setting changes to the POP and SMTP settings in mail mail preferences with only limited results. The prompts for the password from MAC Mail were less often but still occurring. After many frustrating hours and many 'techs' strange advice. the problem was narrowed down to the iPhone or any other device that automatically checks mail along with your computer. Their (AT&T/Yahoo!) latest word is, and I quote:
"Yahoo! Will continue to mention
that no email account can be accessed from 2 sources at the same time.
This will either result in webmail "lock" (the error code 5 while using
webmail) or the issue you have had experienced when using MAC MAIL and
Iphone together. Apologies that the way you have it set up (iphone and
MAC MAIL set to check automatically)will not be feasible without getting
the prompt to enter PW using MAC MAIL."

[SpikeDDS]

Occassionally, I will get these prompts for passwords. Sometimes it gets crazy, but lately everything's been OK. However, when I try to run Keychain First Aid, I get an error message: Keychain verification terminated unexpectedly.
Suggested course of action? Do nothing?
Spike

[schoonerman]

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However, when I try to run Keychain First Aid, I get an error message: Keychain verification terminated unexpectedly.

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Are you trying to run a "left over" freestanding Keychain First Aid program on a modern system where the feature is part of the Keychain Access utility?
If so, use the modern form (and either archive or toss the old program so you won't be tempted by it again).

[schoonerman]

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Youll find your keychains stored here: youruserfolder/Library/Keychains.

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There was a change in naming at some point (at or before Panther, it seems, as my keychain on my machine that begain life in Panther has the modern name).
If your keychain file is inherited from before the change (and you haven't created a new one), it will be named the same as your username, rather than login.keychain.
"Inherited" includes doing a clean install of Tiger and then having the Migration Assistant migrate everything from a clone made before the install. (On my oldest machine, my keychain is inherited from 10.0, by way of upgrade installs through Panther, then the above clean install/Migration Assistant method going to Tiger on one machine.)
It's not unreasonable to believe that the naming change happened with the same version which incorporated the Keychain First Aid program into Keychain Access but of course that guess could be entirely wrong.

[flosofl]

I had this issue (10.4.10) with always being asked to unlock the keychain for Safari, Mail.app, and iTunes (and others). I trired Keychain First Aid and it wasn't fixing the problem (in fact it couldn't find any problems). It was driving me insane.
Long story short, it turns out that SSHKeychain (makes using SSH Agent easy) was causing the problem. As soon as I unloaded it, all my problems with keychain access went away. Now, instead of being loaded on login, I just load it when I know I'll be bopping in and out of different boxes all day via SSH.
I'm sure there's a setting or something in SSHKeychain I'm overlooking, but for now this solution seems to cause the least amount of pain.

[whitedog]

And, if Keychain First Aid doesn't work, there's always the option of tossing the keychain and starting over. This strategy is easier if you've kept a record of the logins and passwords you use regularly. Such a list is also helpful if you have to reset Safari, cleaning out cookies and saved names and passwords. This happened to me recently when Safari began re-downloading a file every time it was launched. Cleaning caches didn't help. So I gradually expanded the reset parameters, and it wasn't until I included cookies that the repeated downloads stopped. And, of course, I needed some passwords in order to restore the cookies that automatically apply the login info on some web sites - like Version Tracker and Macworld, that "see" me when I visit them.