Issues with Windows 11 Pro Documents Folder Icon

I have a fresh installation of Windows 11 Pro, about a couple weeks old or so. The Documents folder was stubbornly stuck on OneDrive. I followed a YouTube video that showed how to move it successfully. Afterwards I removed OneDrive from startup but didn't remove it altogether.

I won't go into the details of my attempted fix. But the lingering side effect is the local Documents folder lacks an icon and will NOT even browse for an icon. I even have an extracted icon file, from imageres.dll, for the Documents folder. But the folder properties box on the Customize tab does not have the usual buttons (Choose File & Restore Default) to prompt for an icon change. I had those buttons yesterday, which didn't work. But after tampering with the registry, even those buttons are gone.

The easiest option is to simply reinstall the OS from scratch. But then I'd lose a couple weeks of software installs and configurations. The other option is to live with it.

You can see the attached screenshots for more details. The Documents folder is not grouped to the other folders such as Downloads.

Hopefully someone can help?

smalltalk said:

I followed a YouTube video

Click to expand...

Your first mistake. There are tutorials here about most everything you need to deal with Windows 11.
Normally, I would give you the proper way of dealing with onedrive, but since I have absolutely no clue what all you did to get that result, here's how I would straighten it out.

Create a new local account
1. Settings>Accounts>Scroll down and click on Other Users.
Select add account>select I don't have this person's signin information
In user name box name the account.
Very Important- Make the new user an administrator. To the right of the new user name click down arrow. Select Change account type.
Click arrow to right of standard user and select Administrator.

2. While still logged into old account COPY & PASTE (NOT MOVE) any files you want saved into folders on your external drive. (Documents, Desktop, Music, Pictures, Downloads.) It is important to use copy and paste to prevent permission problems. If you are unable to do this you can always access Onedrive on the web to retrieve files. Sign in - Microsoft OneDrive

3.. unlink Onedrive if it is linked. Unlink Account and PC from OneDrive in Windows 11 Tutorial
Note: even once you unlink the PC from onedrive, your current files are still stored in Onedrive until you manually remove them from Onedrive on the web.

4.. Restart computer.

DO THIS FROM NEW ACCOUNT

5.. On signin screen you will see 2 accounts. Select the NEW LOCAL ACCOUNT name and it will ask you to set up a password and password hints. Also answer all the other setup option questions.
Your new desktop will be created.
COPY and PASTE the files you saved to the external media into the personal folders of your new account.

6.. Once everything is correct in new account, delete the old account. Settings>Accounts>Other Users>Click the down arrow next to your old account name and click Remove.

7. Open task manager. In left pane Select “startup apps” If Onedrive is in list of startup apps, RIGHT click on it and disable.

Documents folder Icons are generally referenced in the hidden desktop.ini file in the respective folder (Pictures, Videos, Downloads, Documents)

Thanks @glasskuter!

I was able to restore the Documents icon per your instructions. However it feels like starting over. Yes all of my apps are still there. But I had to rebuild my profile manually. For example all of my Brave browser history is gone. I even backed Brave up under AppData > Local using the Beyond Compare utility. Even so there were lots of permission errors and even then the browser is like a clean slate.

This isn't a big issue because I've only had the installation about 3 weeks. But if I had it for months, it would be a big issue.

I had to create the new account as local with I don't have this person's signin information like you said. But on the next prompt, there's Get a new email address and Add a user without a Microsoft account, I had to choose the second option because my existing profile had the Microsoft account email address. Your instructions did NOT include this step. So I managed to convert it to an Microsoft account later. Let me know if this's what you intended.

I do have a full backup of my system before this change. I can restore the former configuration in perhaps 30 minutes. So if you think I could have retained my profile settings better, I can redo it.

I'm sorry you are not happy with the suggestion. The reason I chose to suggest you go with creating a new account rather than trying to straighten out the old one is it's a guessing game what you did that hung the documents folder in onedrive.. Onedrive Youtube videos are a dime a dozen and most do not handle it correctly and give full steps like the tutorials on this forum does. Onedrive is enough of a PITA under the best of circumstances.

When dealing with onedrive one first has to (1)turn off backup folder syncing. (2)move his files to his user folder, (3)unlink the account and PC from onedrive, (4)disable onedrive from autostarting or uninstall onedrive...
in that order.

Yes it's fine if you didn't want to use the local account and that you changed back to a MS account once the folder was straightened out. Most people are so glad to get away from a MS account and back to a local account they don't do that. Just make sure backup and sync didn't get turned back on when you did. https://www.elevenforum.com/t/turn-on-or-off-onedrive-folder-backup-syncing-across-windows-11-devices.4321/

As far as your bookmarks you could have manually exported them and imported into the new account. All modern browsers these days have a sync feature that, if turned on, keeps all browser settings, passwords, extensions, and bookmarks in sync across all devices so that exporting is not necessary.

Actually I'm not unhappy. In fact it seems like my system is faster with the new profile. Perhaps a fresh profile is leaner?

I just figured out how to change my profile back to local and it's working okay. One benefit of the local account is a preferred user name. The old one was based on my Microsoft account email and I never liked it.

My system is a VM running on a Linux desktop under KVM. That's why I said restoring it back would be easy. It's not my long term goal to run W11 in a permanent VM. My W10 machine is too old for W11. It's a 2nd gen i7 quad core. I could do the work arounds but prefer not to. My Linux desktop is a 6th gen i5 quad core with 32 GB RAM. The W11 VM has 16 GB allocated. I've had no warnings about the unsupported CPU (i5-6500) and TPM 2.0 is emulated in the VM. I later discovered the host machine has TPM 2.0 anyway. So eventually I'll move this to better hardware.

I'm using rclone to access OneDrive. I first used it on Linux. It doesn't actually download the files locally, but rather sets up a remote drive. There's a Windows version of rclone that requires WinFsp to run. It's obviously not as fast as local storage but also saves drive space. That's how I'm accessing OneDrive on W11.