Starting today: logging into Hotmail gives "Please try again" or IE crashes

Starting this morning whenever I tried to sign in to Hotmail (IE 10 Desktop) the URL would flash between -- I think -- Hotmail.com and live.com and then tell me it encountered a problem and to try to login later. I verified that other sites requiring the same authentication (e.g. SkyDrive) didn't have this issue. (At this time the "Modern" IE 10 seemed to work fine but later on it began displaying the same behavior as the Desktop version). I fired up a new Windows 7 VM, IE 9, went to Hotmail and successfully logged in. Next I disabled all Start-up Addins for IE 10 Desktop but now when I try to login to Hotmail I get a 5050 answer: 50% of the time the application crashes, the other 50% of the time it asks me to logon later. I also tried logging into "live.com" instead of "Hotmail.com" and am getting the flashing URL bar again and the message "Something went wrong and we can't sign you in right now. Please try again later." Finally, I found that by running Desktop IE 10, as Administrator, my login was accepted. I was going to uninstallreinstall IE 10 but could not any such option. For what it is worth, Windows Defender did not find any issues.

How can I determine the source of this issue?

TIA,

edm2

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