OneDrive update manifesting itself differently in three separate accounts

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I am just completing the building of a Windows 10 Pro, 21H2 system with Office 2021. There are three local accounts on the system – one administrator’s account, one normal user account for me and another normal user account for my wife.

Up until this morning, the File Explorer window in each of the accounts had a single occurrence of OneDrive in the navigation pane. (I should mention at this point that neither I nor my wife use OneDrive, but we are happy for OneDrive to remain in the File Explorer window just in case we ever decide to use it.)

However, this morning, I was logged on to my wife’s account in order to set up an Outlook 2021 email account for her. After completing the work, I happened to look in her File Explorer window and, to my surprise, there were two occurrences of OneDrive in the navigation pane. I decided to investigate whether anything had happened in the other two accounts. It had, but not the same as what had happened in my wife’s account. In each of the other two accounts, the single occurrence of the text “OneDrive” in the navigation pane of File Explorer had been replaced by the single occurrence of the text “OneDrive – Personal”.

Further investigation in Control Panel > Programs and Features revealed that OneDrive had apparently been updated today in the background because the “Installed On” date was today’s date.

Can anyone suggest what has happened? Can anyone suggest how to get all three File Explorer windows looking the same again as far as OneDrive is concerned?

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Well, no one replied to my post, but I think that I have worked around it.

After much research, the following path in the registry appears to be the key to my problem:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSID

For two of the accounts/users on my system, the administrator account and my user account, there are two subkeys, {081D…1FE6}, the standard CLSID for OneDrive, and {031E…8DD5}, which I have the faintest idea what it does. But, for my wife’s user account, there is a third subkey, {0427…AFA9}, which has the same values and data as the standard CLSID for OneDrive. This, I believe, is why there were two occurrences of OneDrive in the navigation pane of File Explorer on my wife’s user account.

Taking hints from posts on other forums, I did the following on my wife’s user account using regedit, after creating a restore point, of course:

1. For the standard CLSID for OneDrive, I changed the data of the (Default) value from “OneDrive” to “OneDrive – Personal”.
2. For the third subkey, I changed the data of the value System.IsPinnedToNameSpaceTree from 1 to 0.

That did the trick! Now, when I log on to my wife’s account, File Explorer looks the same as when I log on to the administrator account or my user account, with only one occurrence of “OneDrive – Personal” in the navigation pane. In retrospect, I suppose that I could have simply deleted the third subkey.

As I hinted in my original post, I believe this problem was caused when an update to OneDrive was automatically downloaded and installed in the background while I was logged on to my wife’s account in order to set up an Office 2021 email account for her. Leaving one account on my PC in a different state compared to the other two accounts, I consider it to be a defect. I shouldn’t have to go digging around in the registry to fix it.

I am relatively new to Windows 10 and I am a little concerned that updates to certain applications, like OneDrive and Edge, are downloaded and installed automatically in the background and there doesn’t appear to be any way of preventing this. On my mobile phone (sorry, cell phone, I live in the UK) and iPad, I have full control of when updates to applications are downloaded and updated.

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oldfry

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Edge updates are automatic – as are all other browsers, although some notify you first. This is sensible given it is the most common internet access point for everyone.

I don’t know how OD updates work.

cheers, Paul

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