OneNote Delete

Greetings,

It's been awhile since I've been on this forum. I hope this finds you all well.

I want to start using OneNote for some courses I will be taking. I had used it in the past and uninstalled it as I had no use for it at the time. I have some leftover notebooks that I want gone. I suppose this begs the response, 'well don't worry about them'. Fair enough.

I have tried to delete the old notebooks, but they still show up in the info page. Here's what I've done to try to delete the notebooks:
-deleted on OneDrive
-deleted from Documents folders on hard drive
-looked in backup folders (empty)
-searched and checked all folders related to OneNote
-checked OneNote on Office online

This is like a termite infestation. It's everywhere I noticed a cache folder with a bunch of files. Is it possible that remnants of the notebooks are there? Can I get a process to totally get rid of a OneNote notebook?

OneNote is version 16.0. I installed it by reinstalling Microsoft 365. Windows 10 2004 19041.329.

Any help will be most appreciated,
Graham

Thanks guys,

I tried the cache thing, but when I ran OneNote /safeboot, it just opened the program with no option to clear the cache. I was about to reinstall both versions of OneNote, but decided to have one more look.

I was still concerned about deleting the cache folder, so I read this page, which gave me the impression the world wouldn't come to an end if I did:

Where is the OneNote cache location? How to clear the OneNote Cache?

After a restart, that got rid of any data or pages associated with the left over notebooks. But they were still showing up, even though they were greyed out. I found a YouTube video about deleting notebooks:

Delete a OneNote notebook by Chris Menard - YouTube

At the 2:30 mark, the author pointed out that the notebooks have to be closed. After all that, the old notebooks were gone.

So, here's the process, as I understand it:
-turn off sync for the notebooks
-delete the notebooks on the local drive and/or OneDrive (check any location where they might exist)
-open settings > Save and Backup. Note the location of the cache file. Close OneNote. Navigate there and delete the cache. Also delete backups. It won't delete any existing notebooks and I suspect the cache will be rebuilt and backups will continue to be created.
-restart OneNote. Right click on the dead notebooks and close them (yes this is necessary)
-go to the recent list and delete the dead notebooks

I'm an MS fan, but Microsoft should be embarrassed. How many people would be using Office if it took that kind of effort to delete a Word or Excel document.

I know this is verbose, but hopefully it will help others.

Graham