Problem managing editing deleting from favorites / favourites

For uninteresting reasons I have not had occasion to try to edit my favourites till yesterday.

I find that, if I am connected to the Internet, anything I do is undone within seconds. If I delete a folder of links for example, then it stays deleted, just until I reconnect to the internet. This applies whether trying to do it within Explorer (Favorite>Organize Favorites) or whether I just go to ...Myname\Favorites and perform ordinary deletion.

Deleting a specific link produces the same results... I have a folder of links called BMW Stuff, with three links in it. If I delete a link or links, then they disappear, but return some seconds later, ditto for the whole folder.

It is clear that some sort of sync'ing is going on, and elsewhere I read something about iCloud, but I do not have iCloud installed. I believe it may be happening through my Microsoft account. My favourites are not on OneDrive, but both my laptop (where I am working) and the desktop (which is switched on at home) are automatically signed in to MS.

My next step is to turn off my desktop as soon as I can and repeat the exercise, but I thought, as this is notably well mentioned on various fora, perhaps someone here on this hall of fame might just be able to give an immediate and definitive answer.

Can you provide some clarification? Are you talking about the favourites in Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer (or other browsers) or in the Navigation pane of File Explorer?

In Windows 10 your favourites and favourites bar in Microsoft Edge are now stored in an ESE database file in the DataStore folder at the location below. Maybe these are clashing with your IE favourites via your MS account. I find that IE and Edge seem to be linked in some way.

%LocalAppData%\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe\AC\MicrosoftEdge\User\Default\DataStor e

philc43 said:

Can you provide some clarification? Are you talking about the favourites in Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer (or other browsers) or in the Navigation pane of File Explorer?

In Windows 10 your favourites and favourites bar in Microsoft Edge are now stored in an ESE database file in the DataStore folder at the location below. Maybe these are clashing with your IE favourites via your MS account. I find that IE and Edge seem to be linked in some way.

%LocalAppData%\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe\AC\MicrosoftEdge\User\Default\DataStor e

Thanks for your suggestion. I have disabled/ignored Edge since I first went W10. I am talking exclusively about IE 11.

I have just got to my desktop and found that it still had iCloud installed, so I uninstalled it. I thought that the problem was solved, since rebooting my desktop, I could edit favourites on my laptop.

But it is clearly more arcane than that: the problem seems fixed on the laptop, but it is symptomatically the same on my desktop.

I thought that iCloud was somehow sync'ing the two computers, but something else is going on. My laptop is now 'OK' insofar as I can edit favourites, but my desktop has the original symptoms.

Anybody got the same problem ?

I have resolved the problem.

In Settings > Accounts, under 'Your email and accounts', I had selected 'Sign in with a Microsoft Account' (as distinct from 'Sign in with a local Account' )
Then, still in Settings > Accounts, under 'Sync your settings', there is a switch for 'Internet Explorer Settings' On/Off. This was 'ON' on both machines. I had wanted synchronisation of MS Office, including Outlook, but had not noticed this one.

The method of synchronisation is faulty: editing on one machine should cause the other to keep in sync, but it seems to be some sort of one-way sync that causes the resetting of any deletions or cut and paste ops.

Since I would actually like both machines to have the same Favorites, I switched OFF this synchronisation and instead, relocated my Favorites onto OneDrive - OneDrive seems to handle the sync properly as the state is a reflection of the most recent file operations.

Hope this is helpful to someone else. (Not a lot of people seem to use 'Sign in with a Microsoft account'.)