"Sign in to Chrome" missing; No syncing options in chrome://settings; Chrome: 37.0.2062.102

I found the solution to my problem, by stumbling upon

chrome://policy

where SigninAllowed was flagged false and SyncDisabled was flagged true

These two flags can be set via the following registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\SigninAllowed HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\SyncDisabled

Just for reference.

The registry keys that I found to control this were

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome\SigninAllowed
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome\SyncDisabled

rather than

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\SigninAllowed
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\SyncDisabled

I had to run regedt32 as an administrator to update the settings.