Updated on: 23rd November 2020

Well, it looks like the bug that Microsoft is dealing with is not something simple. Yesterday I was forced to change the password for my account, which has Administrator privileges due to some “too much gaming” by my 6 years old ;)

Immediately after the password change and restart, I started getting the message “OneDrive isn’t signed in” & one more thing I noticed was Microsoft Edge’s Sync profile account signed off. I always had a feeling that Microsoft Edge has something to do with the entire mess & I am not sure whether observing the above has any relevance as I am using individual apps to sign in, than using the live account globally.

The one positive thing until is, the entered credentials are still holding up & I was not asked to enter them once again today morning after cold reboot. It looks like Microsoft has messed up the Windows Credential Manager thingy little too deep this time!

**23rd November Update end***

“OneDrive isn’t signed in Please enter your sign-in info to start syncing again.” One of the little annoyances I had to live with post Windows 10, 2004 update.

After long “Googling” I came across multiple suggestions, none of which truly resolved my issues with OneDrive “automatic” signing in. Following couple of leads, I landed on to “Windows Credentials” and found that the OneDrive credentials were missing after a long shutdown & reboot.

This helped me to start finding details about cached credentials being “Expired” after a long interval between shutdown and reboot. I couldn’t find anything very specific explaining about this behavior until this moment.

Then I decided to uninstall OneDrive for a fresh installation. I uninstalled OneDrive, rebooted the box, reinstalled the software and tried various combinations like rebooting, cold reboots for next couple of hours to insure that the cached credentials were holding up. Started this thread and went to sleep the same night & next morning found that the cached credentials were once again missing!

While we were migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7, initial days the OS was plagued with unexplained bugs, causing this blogosphere :). One of the major issues we dealt with was corrupt profile for domain users, those required us to drop and recreate them on client machines!

I applied the same with this case, and did the following:

• Enabled the “Administrator” account (You need minimum one account with Administrator privileges to carryout below)
• Made necessary backups for the user account from which I was having OneDrive sign on issues. Please note, by deleting the user folder, you might lose some valuable data. So make sure adequate backups are made prior you delete the user account and related folders
• Deleted the user account
• Restarted & deleted the user folder (mandatory)
• Re-created the user profile with same username!

Now Windows Credential Manager is holding up OneDrive credentials after 72 hours & I think this could be one of the possible fixes among many others!

regards,

rajesh