Every couple of months Windows XP decides that it does not want to remember passwords anymore in IE (which is the same mechanism some 3rd party apps like gmail notifier use to remember passwords). So I’m writing this more as a reminder to myself as well as a help to anyone who may stumble on this in a search. In order to get that feature working again you have to edit the registry, and in specific you need to get to the subkey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
And set the DWORD for:
DisablePasswordCaching
to:
0
You set it to 1 if you need password caching disabled for some reason.
Enjoy!