Why does Office 365 install downgrade OneDrive version

Question

Why does Office 365 install downgrade OneDrive version

Mike C 0

I've just discovered another huge flaw with Office / OneDrive.

I have lovingly reinstalled a fresh version of Windows 26H2. Everything was working fine with OneDrive.

Until this morning - when OneDrive refused to sign me and I was getting all manner of errors.

Looking further into the problem, it seems like it was caused by me installing Office 365 - which downgraded the OneDrive version from latest build 26 to 23.

How can this happen?

It's really basic stuff and it's taken me hours to recover from it.

I had to reinstall OneDrive and do a full reset / recovery. Another 800gb of downloads....

Why doesn't Office installer check the version?

And why does it even install OneDrive - it's not listed as one of the applications in the Office suite.

Very unhappy about this and I hate to thing what mess has been left behind in my Registry etc.

Before - vanilla windows install

User's image

After Office 365 Install from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/download-office

User's image

I have seen such lousy and lazy engineering from the Office and OneDrive teams - this doesn't actually surprise me much.

M

0 comments

1 answer

Your answer

Answer 1

Hi Mike C,

I understand your frustration. Based on what you've described, it does appear that the OneDrive installation present after installing Microsoft 365 was different from the version that was previously installed, and I can appreciate how concerning that is after spending hours recovering and re-syncing your data.

However, this is a public community forum, and we do not have visibility into the internal design decisions, packaging, or version-management logic used by the Microsoft 365 installer. As a result, we cannot confirm whether the installer is expected to replace a newer OneDrive build with an older one, or whether what you experienced represents an installation issue or bug.

OneDrive is closely integrated with Microsoft 365 applications, so it is not unusual for Microsoft 365 installation media to include OneDrive components. That said, if the installer is indeed replacing a newer OneDrive version and causing sign-in problems afterward, that would be something that Microsoft would need to investigate directly.

I recommend submitting this through the Feedback Hub and contacting Microsoft Support so the issue can be reviewed by the appropriate product team. If you can consistently reproduce the behavior on a clean system, providing the before-and-after OneDrive version numbers and installation logs would be particularly valuable.

Thank you for taking the time to report your experience and provide the screenshots.