Forum Discussion

Bruce Weatherford's avatar
Bruce Weatherford
Brass Contributor
Mar 23, 2017

Orphaned OneDrive link in Explorer left navigation that cannot be deleted

One of our users has an orphaned/duplicate link to thier OneDrive for Business folder for our company that cannot be deleted.  I think we got into this situation when switching her from the old Groove.exe.  Unfortunately we have tried everything but cannot delete that link.  See the picture below and the error we get when attempting to remove the link.  Any ideas on how to remove it?

 

Thanks, Bruce...

  • I see that the link you want to remove has a final dot (i.e. a final ".").

    You could try and go to the registry to search for the corresponding string (with the final dot, of course).

    Then you should delete the corresponding entry.

    Standard warning: misusing Registry Editor can render your system unstable or even inoperable!

     

    • Bruce Weatherford's avatar
      Bruce Weatherford
      Brass Contributor

      Thanks Salvatore Biscari,

       

      I was hoping there was an easier way to fix other than editing the registry but I did find what I needed to delete.  It was a key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\{guid} that had the (Default) value of the string I was looking for.  As soon as I deleted that key that folder was removed from Windows explorer.

       

      Thanks for your response and giving me that extra push to dig into the registry!

       

      Thanks, Bruce...

       

      • Bruce Weatherford's avatar
        Bruce Weatherford
        Brass Contributor

        Making this change actually caused OneDrive to stop working.  So we disconnected the account and then re-connected and it started syncing again.  But then it got stuck in sync mode so had to run  OneDrive.exe/reset and after restarting OneDrive again all was good. 

         

        So much work to remove a bad link!

         

Resources