I had some sad experience with Windows 11 losing the data set up for Windows Hello.

The thing is that it’s quite complex and maybe there are some implementation flaws also.

As one example, if I re-enroll fingerprints, I get a message that the maximum allowed number of fingerprints allowable is registered already.

It seems that the actual fingerprint data is not being reset (on the reader device?) when the PIN is disabled and re-enabled (I preferred to re-use the PIN I had used before).

Recently, I noticed that the Hello data became unavailable after I had turned off Secure Boot in UEFI and booted some OS from a flash drive (not touching Windows in any way!).

When booting Windows (Secure Boot still off), I got a message that the PIN (and dependent) is unavailable.

So I restarted the machine, re-enabled Secure Boot, but still the Hello data was unusable.

So I set it up once again.

Obviously I wonder what’s going on when Windows is booted with Secure Boot being disabled.