Marie, I had an email through yahoo and gmail at different times for surfing and newsletters. I had trouble with each one and cancelled the accounts. You have no idea how much trouble that caused me. There were places I could not access like my friends card at Eddie B's, the same type of card at BB and a couple of other places. I could not remember which email address I used for those places. I lost points = a lot of money at BB. Finally I just set up a disposable email through my server and use it. No more problems.

those are called password managers and one of the most popular free ones is keePass KeePass Password Saf you do have to make sure when you click on the download button you get the windows version because it also has a linux version. another one that many use is roboform, not as popular as it once was. another free open source option Password Safe

Some how I believe MS requires an account because they have Win 8 users on their cloud already and that bothers me greatly. How do I know that? I built a computer and installed Win8 even though it was a.ready on another machine. Not only did MS refuse activation but the new computer suddenly had all my wallpaper. How could that be? The only connection was the email address I had given (I had a live.ca address long before this) So I wipe the new machine and installed Win7 and again was refused activation because it was already in use. but it was not because the new computer had parts from the old Win7 machine. Ten minutes finding a phone number and 45 minutes arguing with a lady in Mexico I got activated. But not before they tried to force me to buy another licence. That was no going to happen. After activation I needed to talk to the supervisor the young lady told me. I did and he asked if MS could send me a survey to fill in, I heartily agreed and was pleased to find a space to vent my frustration with them. Probably to no avail but I felt better afterwards. A point I find frustrating with Win8 is the back up. I started out on an external drive but later installed a second HDD in the computer. Now the backup procedure refuses to acknowledge that and still looks for the external with seemingly no way for me to correct the issue. We need to love these computers :~)

I read that although pay pal is owned by ebay that pay pal was not affected at all in this incident. Now if that is true or they just don't want everyone to panic who knows I mean they took this long to tell us about ebay. Mine has been changed, I did not have any difficulties at all.