Folder Redirection Woes with Chrome Forced Sign-In

[Shaun_Dark_Lord]

Hi All

 

At some point in November 2025, folder redirection just stopped working for our students.  It looks like it was initially broken by KB5070349, but subsequent updates have broken it further.

 

I've spent far too much time this week trying to restore the functionality.  The initial November issue seems to have been due to the fact that we restricted the students from accessing the "Run" dialogue.  But granting them this then just gets broken by other patches, so I wasn't confident that I'd ever finish playing whack-a-mole against Microsoft's update team.

 

I replicated the functionality with a login script to create Junctions for each of the folders I wanted to redirect.  This worked great - But then when I started testing applications, Chrome broke.

 

We're primarily a Google site, so Chrome is pretty integrated into everything we do, and the Chrome extension that does web filtering is critical, so we force sign-in to Chrome.  By enabling folder redirection using the Junctions, Chrome has decided that none of the buttons on the Sign in to Chrome page should work any more.

 

I got a couple of other traditional folder redirection methods working, but all broke Chrome.

 

I then tried Work Folders, as it looked like everything would initially be written to C:\, and then synced to the local server.  Work Folders works great - But as soon as I updated the Documents folder location from "%USERPROFILE%\Documents" to "%USERPROFILE%\Work Folders\Documents" Chrome broke again.

 

Has anyone else had this, and did you find a solution?

[Shaun_Dark_Lord]

Ignore this found the issue with Chrome.