A Simple Fix for Certain Account Syncing Issues

  • Thread starter NoticedMender75
  • Start date
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NoticedMender75

I was having issues with my Microsoft account on Windows 10 not being able to synchronize themes and settings. It looked like this:


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After being unsuccessful finding a working solution from the discussions here, and preferring not to try anything risky on my own, I contacted Microsoft technical support to try resolving the issue. While the technician was very polite and made an honest effort to help, they ended up incorrectly determining that my user account was "corrupted", and attempted to fix it by creating a new user account and moving my associated files over to it verbatim from the old account. In the process, they attempted to copy my OneDrive shortcut over and it created major problems for me, where every file would attempt to run off the cloud instead of locally even after I'd specified that I want to keep and use local copies of everything, and it would take half a minute for each file to even give me a context menu when I'd right-click on it. To make matters worse, the syncing issue shown in my screenshot came right back after they'd already assured me that the original issue had been fixed and terminated the support session.


I ended up managing to resolve the original issue on my own, and since my PC was only just recently purchased, I opted to back up my essential files and do a full factory reset. Thankfully the OneDrive issue created by the Microsoft technician went away after the factory reset, and everything has worked fine since with my Microsoft account now syncing properly, after I discovered the actual source of the problem. My Windows 10 user account was never corrupted as claimed by the technician, it was a simple matter of incorrect system settings. In the screenshot that follows, I chose to link my account to a work account which is only meant to be used for email. In the process, it prevented me from synchronizing my settings and themes through my Microsoft account.


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By disconnecting my work account, everything returned to normal and now I have this lovely healthy screen to show for it:


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Note that my theme is set to change colours every so often, hence the colour discrepancies in the screenshots. So I just wanted to create this thread as a note to other Windows 10 users who may be having similar issues. Also when setting up Exchange accounts in mail and calendar, the options in the menu for choosing whether to give your work/school account control over your PC vs only allowing it access to the mail and calendar app should be more clearly explained. Originally I didn't even notice the little option to only give it access to the app for email purposes, hiding shyly off in the corner. Pressing the bigger "yes" button causes your PC to automatically connect the unwanted work/school connection shown in my second screenshot.


Also if Microsoft technical support wants to switch the user over to a new Windows 10 account for some reason, they should be advised to avoid copying the OneDrive link verbatim if they don't already know not to do that. My PC recovery process after ending the support call would have been much simpler and easier that way.

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