Folders Shared with me are syncing as internet shortcut in OneDrive on Windows PC

Today (2/23/25) is the first time I have experienced the problem. There are threads of other people saying this has been issue since June 2024.

the work around of creating another account has started to fail after windows update.

it seems to be on purpose to stop this service for family members.

this was still educated as a function for family plan members. things dont add up here.

they have recently increased the price but not resolving such issues which are affecting people around the world.

they probably know that you can't or had a hard time cancelling because you needed the office suite and the Onedrive storage of 1TB

whats going on Microsoft, you can do better than this.

Inward art sale go to account info in there you have an option for updating to the latest version of office this needs to be done on all machines they're about four versions that are broke if you have an updated I have seen some machines take eight or nine times to update you need to reboot between each update. Also some people have both business and personal they need to make sure that the one that's in control of Everything Is the personal if the sending person is using the personal.

Family office the update is the White Cloud is the old version of OneDrive standalone. Professional office is the blue cloud it is SharePoint OneDrive

I share between the home and Business will always Resort in a shortcut into OneDrive and not a download of the folder as you want. All shortcuts have to be removed the file folder that includes the dent on it has to be moved out of the OneDrive 100% I create a folder at the root of C called OneDrive backup and I move the folder from the OneDrive into this folder on the C drive. I reboot both computers at this point. I go into the cloud or web version of Outlook and create the folder I want to share and do read write permissions and send it to the person that needs to get it they need to go to the shared folder in the web version and tell it to download at this point that machine will have to reboot before that download folder will show up download it. Once this is confirmed working on both ends you can move the contents of the folder into the shared folder do not change permissions just put it in there and file explorer from Windows it may take it 30 minutes to an hour to fully sink and be working the pending on the size in this situation I usually give it one hour for each gig of data as a minimum Do Not Go Changing permissions do not do anything with it until it gets through sinking the data on both sides trust the procedure it works.

I've tried this several times, all using M365 personal (white cloud) and the folders in question are shared with a combination of paid users, users under my family account and free users. Across all this there is a mix combination of who can see the file in Explorer and who is now restricted to online only.

One user who is under my paid family account had this issue from the beginning almost 9 months ago, every possible fix and attempt has been tried with them to no fix. In the past month another paid user who several folders shared with had this happen. Then over the weekend (which seems to be where many have suddenly had issues) the second user under my paid family account had all their folders turned to .url instead. Again tried new folders and fixes and no success.

To note, all the folders I've shared with several different accounts are all private, there is no business M365 in use. They have all lost access at different times over the past 9 months. Also to note every folder is always and has always had full read-write access as it's all team based work where everyone needs access.

The inability to share locally folders between M365 Family and M365 Business is ridiculous but I can understand, but are we saying that if you have the free version of OneDrive you are restricted to online only, no File Explorer ability?

Also on all this and the mention that the issue is fixed, Microsoft still have this officially listed as a bug, so is there communication from Microsoft detailing somewhere more specifically that this whole lengthy process is required.