cannot sign in to openDNS account to set-up parental controls using NETGEAR Genie

I'm dismayed that this problem has gone on for so long.  I'm sure its a finger pointing match between Netgear, opendns and microsoft.  there are two password problems.  one passing credentials between NetgearGenie to your router, and one between NetgearGenie to OpenDNS.com.  The first one is a fairly obvious password token issue within the app.  the second is most likely a password encapsulation problem. most likely completely out of netgear's control.  its probably blocked by Windows firewall or is munged up before OpenDNS can read it.

two things you can do to make it work:

1.  easy way:    just use the Android app.  its the only one that works.  I started following all the advice on this blog but its really the only one that worked.

2.  harder way:  use the android app to activate the parental controls, but still enable NetgearGenie on a PC to manage them.

Here's what I did to make option 2 work:

First download the netgear genie from the link on your router on your PC. Save the downloaded file.  Once you enable parental controls, the "parental controls" link on the router web interface changes to redirect you to netgear.opendns.com, which is where you will do most of your filtering and configuring.  if you want to install netgeargenie onto another computer, you'll need that file.

Now you can dig out someone's Android device, install the netgearGenie app and configure your parental controls there.   I set default filtering for "none".  (tell you why later)

start NetgearGenie on your PC and click on "router settings" and log in.  I also had to specify my router IP manually, in my case 192.168.1.1. This shoudl sucessfully create a password token it can send to other functions without using the broken password hashing code. (except of course for the parental controls link.  ignore this link from now on)  Then go back to "Network Map".  click on the kids computer.  at the bottom it says "parental controls filtering: Default level on router".  click on "modify" and then change the Parental Controls filtering to "high".    Conversely, you can set the default to high, and then select your computer and set it to "none".  I'm guessing this works because it identifies computers by MAC address.  However, its possible that its by IP address, and if you have DHCP, this could be a problem to have some computers filtered and some not.

That's basically it.  use the NetgearGenie PC app to select which computers get filtered and which don't.  Log into the router and click on the "parental controls" link to open a new browser tab to netgear.OpenDNS.com to configure blocks of time or default filtering settings.  I haven't tried blacklist/whitelist yet, but its my next task.  I really hope its not hamstrung like the built-in NetGear router functionality that can only block http (unencrypted) connections, not https(encrypted), which almost all connections are now.