OneDrive grey cross with Horizon Instant Clones, AppVolumes and FSLogix

Some time ago, I encountered two similar cases using OneDrive on a non-persistent VDI environment. Both environments were already using AppVolumes for most applications, Dynamic Environment Manager for user profiles and FSLogix Office container for Outlook cache.

After installing OneDrive using the machine-wide installation option /allusers, I was able to configure OneDrive using the users’ credentials so there was no need to provide an additional user and password. However, once OneDrive was configured, the files didn’t show correctly in Windows Explorer. All files were showing a grey cross on each file icon

Also the status column, which should normally show if the file is stored offline or not, wasn’t showing any information.

Once I tried opening a file, it downloads it from OneDrive and the grey cross disappeared and the file opened fine.

By accident, I noticed that suddenly, after about 10 minutes, the explorer screen suddenly refreshed and the icons showed the normal file icons and the status column showed the correct status of the files. However, after logging off and back on to the session, it started again showing the grey icons. At random, it sometimes showed the icons correctly, but mostly it didn’t. I also could not use the right-click menu options “Always keep this file offline” or “Free up space”.

When I browsed to the OneDrive folder using a File Open or Save As… dialog, the files also showed up correctly, even when in Explorer they didn’t.

First thing was to make sure everything was on the latest version. I tried several OneDrive version and FSLogix versions, but always had the same issue, so it had nothing to do with the version.

Second thing I tested was to enable the explorer option to “Launch folder windows in a separate process”. Enabling this option, made it better, but I still got the grey icons from time to time. So I needed to test further.

As OneDrive was installed on the golden image, I first disabled the AppVolumes agent to be sure it was not interfering with OneDrive. With AppVolumes agent disabled, the OneDrive folder showed always correctly in explorer and I never saw grey crosses on the icons.

So I started to look into creating a custom snapvol.cfg configuration to exclude OneDrive.exe process from AppVolumes. I created a new folder named “custom” in c:\program files (x86)\CloudVolumes\Agent\Config. In that folder I created an empty text file “snapvol.cfg” where I put in the following line:

exclude_process_name=onedrive.exe

After reenabling the AppVolumes agent again, the OneDrive folder always showed up correctly in Explorer. No more grey cross on the icons and a correct representation of the offline status.

I also checked with VMware support people and they suggested to change the snapvol.cfg exclusion to only the following registry key and not the whole OneDrive process:

exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\SyncRootManager

After modifying the snapvol.cfg file with the above registry exclusion, OneDrive still showed correctly in explorer all the times.

I Hope this post can help others with the same issue.
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