edge favorites cluster

i stupidly used microsoft first-level support for this.

i have a windows 10 laptop and two windows 10 tablets. within the past week, i have factory reset both tablets. still, after a few days, neither tablet has the Edge favorites on the laptop synced to them. yes, the "sync favorites and reading list" box is checked in edge on all the devices.

this microsoft chat tech listened to my problem, repeatedly, then opened a remote support session. his first move, before i could stop him, was to open Edge settings on one tablet and click Import Favorites.

i explained to him in capital letters that those weren't edge favorites, they were old IE favorites, which were not the same as edge favorites, because they were IE favorites. not Edge favorites. i showed him the significant differences between the Edge favorites on my laptop and the garbage he had just imported into Edge on my tablet. he tried and failed to clear out the edge favorites on the tablet. while this was happening, i noticed that all the garbage IE favorites he just imported into Edge on tablet #1 had synced to Edge on tablet #2 (but not the laptop, luckily, which confirms that my initial non-syncing problem originates on the laptop).

i used the powershell on the tutorial on this site to reset Edge on both tablets. Edge favorites are empty for a few minutes, but the junk favorites keep coming back.

I backed up the clean DataStore folder folder on my laptop. I put that folder in the right spot on my tablets, and the Edge favorites look good for a few minutes, but eventually the junk IE favorites sync back.

so apparently somewhere up in "The Cloud" there is now this bad list of old IE favorites saved as Edge favorites, which was generated this morning, I can't overwrite, so it keeps syncing down to Edge on my tablets.

thoughts on fixing this, other than just manually editing this bad list to make it look like the list I want from my laptop?

I backed up the clean DataStore folder folder on my laptop. I put that folder in the right spot on my tablets, and the Edge favorites look good for a few minutes, but eventually the junk IE favorites sync back.