This is on Ubuntu 20.04, so GNOME 3.36, so this might well be fixed by now, leaving this anyway if it isn’t since it’s a bit weird to reproduce:
I am posting this here since I do not even know where to even start to file this as an issue. What happened was the following:
I logged into my work PC and tried to use files to connect to a Nextcloud DAV share. This dav share is on a bad connection so I am used to timeouts, which, at some point, usually do recover.
This time it didn’t, though. I noticed that the Nextcloud account was using an old host cname that was pointing to a dyndns account that also is quite flaky. I then went into GOA to change the hostname to a more reliable alias and noticed that the secrets for the server have become invalid.
So I tried to log in again, which caused gnome-settings to be stuck trying to talk to GOA daemon - which I only figured out by looking at the journal, I again was initially under the assumption that this is related to the flaky connection I mentioned above.
Since killing goa multiple times did not help, I resorted to the remedy of “reboot” - the machine was up since weeks for now anyway - and only after that I realized that I had changed passwords remotely and hence lost access to the login keyring.
Somewhere on the way some notices along the lines of files telling me that my login has expired or settings telling me that it cannot communicate to goa or whatever would have been nice.