My favourites Bar icons in Windows 11 are not coloured. How can I restore the colour.

Yeah, just played about with the two settings and can confirm exactly what you have said. Just to add I already had start-up boost enabled the had Edge running in the background disabled. Can you confirm if you had your settings the same as me before figuring out this workaround? Could be that for some odd reason start-up boost is causing this issue or at least contributing to it in some way.

"Startup boost" seems to be the key one to disable. If I re-enable "Continue running background extensions..." then all the msedge.exe processes are killed on exit and the yellow folders stay.

Thanks for posting this, I too can confirm this works. Though it's a bit odd that if you re-enable both start up boost and continue running background extensions it seems to be hit and miss whether or not it keeps the yellow folders. Though just to be clear, disabling both of these options (so far) has brought back the yellow folders and I'm running the standard version (not beta or anything) 131.0.2903.112.

I found that if I went into Settings -> System and Performance and disabled both "Startup boost" and "Continue running background extensions and apps when Microsoft Edge is closed" that Edge no longer ran several processes in the background after closing the current session, so it worked every time after that (retained the yellow folders).

Instead of the stable version, install and use the beta version (132.0.2957.55, Dec 16, 2024) which has the yellow folders.