All Recent & Pinned File Links Lost

I agree with David..."it must involve OneDrive and how Word interacts with that server-based data". My recent list functionality also has returned without an update. Yesterday, I totally uninstalled One Drive as I've always been suspect of it anyways. This didn't help. Today everything is fixed however, when I click the Open icon, "OneDrive - personal" is still displayed. If I click on it and right-click the folder and select "Copy path to clipboard" and paste it to notepad, it displays "https://d.docs.live.net/........".  If I paste the URL into a browser, it brings me to One Drive online with my account info.

Hey, Microsoft. I do not want One Drive! I have uninstalled it. Do not host web space for files from my computer. I do not want this!

One other note. I never "Stay logged in" when signing into Microsoft and until yesterday everything has worked fine. Now, I can no longer run an Office app that's installed on my PC without being logged in to my Microsoft accoutn. Hmmmm. Cut it out Microsoft!

As of 1140p, Pacific Time, 03/22/24, using Microsoft Office Home and Student 2021, my Excel pinned items are still present as they were a few hours ago. Also, my MS Word pinned items have returned. Both lists return even after closing and reopening these programs. So far, so good.

This is a workaround, not an answer. While the issue is 'resolved' by rolling back to 2402 - 2403 will eventually be pushed out to everyone, and short of stopping all updates (not a good solution security wise), the issue will return (unless the final 2403 build resolves the issue). Microsoft needs to resolve systemically. But as I said in my earlier post, uninstalling Office 365 and then grabbing a new install from your MS account portal will for the moment pull 2402 and 'resolve' the issue.

I have 1 person so far (at least reported to me) in my org with this issue. I don't believe it's a version problem. I'm on the Semi-Annual release channel (2308 build 16731.20504), I control the versions being installed to desktops, and I haven't done anything with Office since January this year. This error appeared for us at the same time it did for all of you (March 20, 2024) with the same symptoms. Can't pin docs and the recent file list is empty and remains empty - or in our one case it's showing 2 files from over 1 year ago - the date we migrated to M365. It's disconcerting that MS has this much control over a LOCALLY installed application. This kind of thing should not be managed in anyway by cloud services, which I suspect is the issue and why no one can fix this except Microsoft themselves.