I just got bit by something like this, I think. I am not sure.
The background right now is that recently, my trixie laptop started prompting me for the gnome-keyring password, which it wasn't doing before. I couldn't figure out the password for that prompt: it's not my login password! Eventually, I found this issue, renamed .gnome2/keyrings to .local/share/keyrings, rebooted, and then tried again, without luck. Then I moved out .local/share/keyrings altogether and rebooted. Now I had a gnome-keyring prompt again and, without thinking, typed an old session password that is hotwired to my fingers and poof, it worked. And now i have .gnome2/keyrings again, and no .local/share/keyrings. So that's weird: the .gnome2 file was *recreated*! But what's even weirder is it seems to work with a really old session password of which there shouldn't be any trace left on disk! How the heck did that password unlock a (new!) keyring?! I should also point out that, until I moved the keyrings out, any application that tried to get a key from gnome-keyring would just hard hang: complete UX freeze, kill -9 to recover the window. This is Linux angela 6.12.48+deb13-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.12.48-1 (2025-09-20) x86_64 GNU/Linux recent trixie horribly customized sway desktop. a.
