After adding a corporate e-mail account to my phone, my device asked to encrypt itself as well as the attached SD card, and change the lock to password. I immediately removed the account, but the security restrictions are still in place. The device no longer requires encryption, but it refuses to read the SD card without encrypting it ("Preparing SD card") appears in the pulldown menu. It's also stuck on password lock with all other options greyed out.

From reading this post, I tried all of the following to remove these restrictions; nothing has worked.

1. Deleted all e-mail accounts.
2. Settings > Security > Device administrators; remove all (including related e-mail accounts.)
3. Settings > Security > Clear credentials; remove all certificates

Nothing succeeds in a) removing the restriction to password lock, and b) stopping the device from constantly trying to encrypt the SD card. Currently there is no way to access the SD card at all without apparently first going through the encryption.

There must be a way to fix this that doesn't involve backing up and wiping the device, or rooting it. Either this is a really strange bug or I'm missing something obvious. I'm running Android 4.2.2 on a Samsung Galaxy S4.