A couple of days ago I changed my Windows 7 login password. My laptop is on my company's domain, so password changes are done over the internal network.

Since changing the password I noticed that all my saved Chrome passwords are missing. Also Skype, Windows Live, Internet Explorer and Outlook lost their saved passwords. I guess there could be more applications with lost passwords, but I have not opened them yet.

This makes me think that most applications saves their passwords to a general password vault on the Windows system and this vault got somehow corrupted when I changed my domain login password for windows.

Do anyone have any idea of how to fix this and prevent it from happening again?

EDIT : More Info

I do development work at the office, so most of the time I bypass the firewall and connect directly to the internet gateway. Now and then I would connect to the company wifi network to do printing and access files on a NAS. So by default my laptop does not connect to the wifi hotspot.

On this occasion to update the password, I had to connect to the wifi. So referring to the comment by OmnipotentEntity below, could this have happened when the system rebooted without a connection to the network as the laptop does not auto connect to the wifi hotspot?