If you have created a family group (Microsoft Family) of your family members’ Microsoft Accounts you may run into the issue of members not being able to sign into their MSA under a local Windows User account you created manually. After attempting to sign in with your Microsoft account (MSA), you may have seen this message:

“email@outlook.com is here already. Another user on this device uses this Microsoft account, so you can't add it here.”

What this means is Windows 11 has reserved accounts and associated them with the family group member’s MS accounts when one of the members signed into Windows with their account.

To fix this, you’ll have to manually delete the accounts that were automatically reserved.

The following steps may need to be performed under an Administrator account.

Run “control userpasswords2” (Win+R) to bring up the old User Accounts interface:

Go to the Advanced tab and click on the Advanced button.

This will open the Local User and Groups Manager (lusrmgr) where you will be able to see the users. Note the ones that resemble the names of the family members—usually the first few letters, combination of first/last. Once you’ve identified the users and ready to delete, right click on the user and click Delete.

Once this done, family members should be able to sign in with their Microsoft accounts on their local Windows user accounts.

Tags: Microsoft account, Microsoft Family, Windows 11

I ran into this issue recently where some files and folders were not accessible in File Explorer, command prompt or PowerShell. with the following error:

The tag present in the reparse point buffer is invalid

They were in the OneDrive folder as placeholders for the Files On-demand feature. After some reading, it appears those are junction files/folders, and got put in a bad state perhaps when OneDrive is terminated or crashes.

What fixed the issue was running chkdsk.exe and fixing the errors. The scan/repair may need to happen on the next system startup, so be prepared to restart.

Tags: OneDrive, Windows 10, Windows Server 2019

The app reset feature in Windows 10 is supposed to help when an app isn’t working right. This is somewhat equivalent to an uninstall and reinstall of the app.

In my experience, it can sometimes make problems worse by completely uninstalling the app you’re trying to reset. In the case of this happening to the Microsoft Store app, you might be scratching your head.

Here’s how you reinstall Microsoft Store if it gets uninstalled after resetting it.

Right click on Start and pick “Windows PowerShell (Admin)”

Run this command:

Get-AppxPackage -allusers

Right click the PowerShell title bar, Edit, Find… and search for “WindowsStore”

Copy the InstallLocation value for the app.

At time of writing the version available resulted in the following value.

C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\
Microsoft.WindowsStore_11712.1001.11.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe

Finally, run the following command and the Microsoft Store app should be reinstalled. If you run into an issue with this, try restarting and running the command again. Make sure to plug in the correct InstallLocation value.

Add-AppxPackage -register
"C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\
Microsoft.WindowsStore_11712.1001.11.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\
AppxManifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode

Tags: Windows, Windows 10

Windows 10 account comes with the option of using Microsoft accounts, but one peeve I have with it―through the out of box experience and addition through Settings―is the lack of control of the local user name it generates.

I usually opt to create a local user account under “Other people” first and sign in with the Microsoft account I want to associate.

Another complication comes up if you have your family members’ Microsoft accounts linked under Family. This practically makes the method above impossible. When you try to sign in using a Microsoft account in the local account you created, you’ll be warned that it’s not possible since it’s already associated to another local account.

To work around this, you’ll need to delete the placeholder account created by the Family feature.

Right click on the Start button and click “Command Prompt (Admin)” and typing the following to display the account names on the PC.

>net users

Some will be the placeholders―usually only a few letters of the first name.

Delete it by typing the following, where [usertodelete] is the placeholder username

>net user [usertodelete] /delete

You should now be able to sign in the Microsoft account with the local account you created.

It seems to recognize that it is now an account of a family member and gets listed under “Your family” with the Family features still intact.

Tags: Microsoft account, Windows, Windows 10

And we’re back.

Tags: Operating System, Windows, Windows 10