Recurring Login Screen for OneDrive for Business

[Peter Mcdermott]

Hello, I have a few colleagues that complain thta the OneDrive for Business login screen keeps appearing despite how many times they successfully log in. Have you also had experience with this or a suggested solution or workaround? Thank you!~

[#2]

I have noticed this as well and for me I think it's because OneDrive is starting up in "personal" mode.  Apparently, it's in the system startup to run the batch file named OneDrivePersonal.cmd which sits in the same directory as OneDrive.exe (%localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive).  That batch file runs the command below.

start %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\OneDrive\OneDrive.exe /client=Personal

I have only recently noticed this so wonder if it's relatively new?  When it's been run you can also see a grey OneDrive cloud in your system tray, indicating it's waiting for someone to sign in using their personal account.  For me this sits alongside the blue (without the white outline) cloud that indicates I've signed into OneDrive with my Office 365 account.  See my figure below where my OneDrive for business is in the middle of sync, which it often does for no reason.

I am definitely interested to hears other's thoughts.  I am running the latest build 17.3.6743.1212.

Thanks, Bruce...

[#3]

@Peter Mcdermott

I've seen this behaviour several times for my customers, often related to a corrupted credential store in Windows.

A complete, or partial, wipe out of the credential store has solved the problem for me.

But be careful, because afterwards you will need to reenter all the credentials, and you can discover to have not all of them at hand!

@Bruce Weatherford

AFAIK, this is absolutely normal and not related to Peter's issue.

[#4]

Hi Bruce,

You hit the nail on the head. It looks like her machine was running the One Drive Personal and One Drive for Business applications side by side. I ran the installer from the Help dialog to ensure she had the latest version and it appears to be working fine right now.

Here's the link: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Get-started-with-the-new-OneDrive-sync-client-in-Windows-61...

[#5]

Hi @Peter Mcdermott I didn't quite understand what you did to fix the problem, would you mind expanding?  To my knoweldge there doesn't seem to be antyhing you can really do to stop it from prompting the user to log into the personal OneDrive unless you remove that entry from the startup?

[#6]

Hi @Bruce Weatherford,

I opened the control panel to the OneDrive personal tool and disabled 'Start OneDrive automatically when I sign in to Windows' and also had the user run the installer to ensure we had the most up to date version. I have them restarting now to ensure that the login message no longer pops up. I'll let you know what we find out...

EDIT: This did not work. I just noticed that the user had a "OneDrive" personal folder in their libraries, so I deleted that. Let's see what happens...

[#7]

Did you have any luck finding a solution? Still experiencing this for a number of users.

[#8]

Not sure if this is the same issue, but we've had numerous issues with our users being prompted to login to One Drive when trying to save a Word document. These users were already logged in with their O365/AD credentials. The solution was to log them out, make sure they don't have other Office Suite applications open, then open a fresh Word doc and have them log in. In some cases a reboot was necesssary. This took care of the issue for all of our users.

[#9]

I now have a hunch that this might be connected to their Office365 license types. Found that one of the users with this issue had ProPlus instead of E3. Could that be related?

[#10]

I opened up a OneDrive support ticket by right-clicking icon in the system try and selecting "Report a problem".

The solution they gave me was to delete the personal OneDrive folder at c:\users\<username>\OneDrive. I found that just by trying to open the empty folder prompted me to login. So I am thinking that some normal system processes, e.g. virus scan, may be touching the folder and thus triggering the login prompt. So I have deleted the folder and will monitor over the next few days to validate if the periodic OneDrive personal prompt does not come back again.

BTW using the "Report a problem" has been a mixed bag. After getting the initial email that they received is issue a few days later I get an email saying that I haven't responded to their suggestion. It can take a few tries before they actually respond with the solution they try. Either this ticketing system has an issue or my solution emails are not getting delivered. But not getting the initial solution emails has been consistent so I think it's an issue on their side.

[#11]

@Peter Mcdermott I opened up a Microsoft support case on this issue and apparently there is a known issue with Windows 7 in that any time the OneDrive folder is somehow toched (e.g. opened) then the prompt comes up.  I have noticed this myself, even on Windows 10 if I remember correctly.

This is hitting us as we push out the OneDrive.exe install as part of our preparation for our OneDrive enablement.  But I think this could happen to any system with Windows 10 or Office 2016 where OneDrive is included in the installation.

The only fix for this currently is to disable OneDrive personal sync for the user in the registry as described in the article below.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-Group-Policy-to-control-OneDrive-sync-client-settings-0...

At some point this fix should be in OneDrive.exe but I don't have any idea on the release timeline.

Thanks, Bruce...

[#12]

This did the trick for me. Thanks for sharing, Peter.

[#13]

I have the problem with users of groove.exe, but not ngsc.  Didn't know which one you were using.

To solve my problem with groove, I created a shortcut folder to get them to their cookies at:  C:\Users\user name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files.  

From there, I have them use search box and look for login.microsoftonline.com.  Delete that cookie, and they are then able to re-login once, until some time in the future, when some token expires, and they have to go through that procedure again.  Not a solution, more like a QUAD (quick and dirty).