How to reset OneDrive for Business when it’s crashing constantly

Recently I’ve messed with my Windows 8.1 profile account, and shortly after my OneDrive for business client started crashing in a loop… it just went crazy, filling my notification area with icons failing to stop. I had no way to reach any menu or remove the folders I’m syncing.

I’ve tried the easy (lazy) way of repairing / uninstalling / removing Office 365 ProPlus (in my case) which turned out useless.. did some manual clean up of registry entries, removed caching files and obviously looked-up forum threads and KB’s which also turned out as you’ve guessed it – useless…

Almost desperate, I’ve turned to the all mighty Process Monitor and started debugging the errors.

Thru closely examining the endless output of entries, I’ve spotted an undocumented registry entry that was being checked by the Groove.exe (which is your OneDrive sync process) upon start-up.

So there I was, crossing fingers,  editing the registry hoping… and BINGO! I have performed a reset to the OneDrive for Business client, and it behaved like the first time I’ve opened it up.

Here it is, Add/Modify these two DWORD values:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Groove]
"FirstSyncComplete"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Groove\Development]
"IsResyncEnabled"=dword:00000001

Hope this post will help more good folks out there.

ilantz