eevee99, cjwb, RuthieV, Lancashire_Lad and others
First, the good news, I can now sign in to my virgin media account ! ! !
Second, the bad news – my account was set up for me by virgin support staff and I can only sign in to it using a virgin email address that I did not want to have and will not use for any other purpose. This is possibly the reason why so many customers are reporting problems? It looks as if you have to have a virgin email address to register your account, so if you haven’t requested one and are trying to register your own email address, it just doesn’t work.
If you’re happy to do this, i.e always sign in to your virgin media account via a virgin email address, send a message to Paul_DN and ask him to set up your account for you. He will request details of your name and account number which you can send via private message and will send you back a virgin email address and password to sign-in.
One particular thing you should be aware of is that the registration system requires the use of a ‘strong’ password. This isn’t properly explained on the help screens, but passwords need to be 8 to 10 characters, starting with a capital letter and including both lower case and numerics, There is also additional validation which may reject strings of characters which it thinks are too easy to guess (i.e short names and words). So make sure the system validates your password as ‘strong’ before submitting it. Otherwise it is rejected, just saying you can’t use it, but without any explanation. Something like a car reg no with some of the letters in lower case and 2 added characters on the end should be fine, e.g Aa99Aaa99. Getting a password accepted at all has been a major irritant to me, so hopefully this advice will help others.
It's taken me a long time to get this far, and I certainly don't regard this issue as now "Resolved". What Paul_DN has provided me with is a viable work-round. If my fellow sufferers keep flooding support staff with requests for work-rounds perhaps Virgin will eventually decide it's time to finally fix this mess.
Good luck to you all
Brian