Dropbox freezes and crashes my file explorer.

[currentj]

Hello,

I am having trouble with dropbox working through my Windows file explorer.  For some reason, within the last week every time I try to navigate to one of my dropbox files the file explorer crashes and I have to force close the program.  I can open files from the specific application.  For instance, if I open Word and then open a file from word it will open, but if I try to open the same file from the windows file explorer it freezes.  I have tried to uninstall and reinstall.  Any other suggestions/solutions?

[Walter]

Hi all, thank you for your reports so far.

For anyone who's affected by this issue, could you try the following steps and let us know if they helped improve matters?

1. Quit and re-launch the Dropbox desktop app after rebooting your computer. 

2. Sign out from your account and then back in via the app's preferences.

3. Quit or (temporarily) uninstall any 3rd party apps that might be monitoring, syncing or backing up your files.

If the issue persists after these steps, you can try a simple reinstall at first and an advanced one as outlined here, if needed. 

Keep us posted please! 

[Illi-Noize]

Same problem here on Windows 11, Dropbox get's stuck, no syncing any more and Explorer is extremely slow. That MUST be a Dropbox Client problem, so many guys here with that problem 😞

[rdmetal]

I'm seeing the same problem. It started happening exactly last Tuesday and it correlates with the update to the latest stable version 202.4.5551. I also have about 400'000 files in my dropbox, but everything worked perfectly before then. I even already tried to reinstall Dropbox, but this didn't help.

What I'm seeing is Dropbox just stopping to sync anything (up or down) sometimes. I feel it has to do with files that are opened in exclusive write mode (for example, Outlook PST files). It is expected that those files can't be synced while the offending program is open, but before this update the files would be synced by the program afterwards, now Dropbox just does nothing at all afterwards.

The oddest issue is that when I'm trying to open an online-only file, it won't open as Dropbox is stuck. I then proceed to try and restart the Dropbox client to fix it, but when I "Quit Dropbox", suddenly all the files open before the client closes.

[Walter]

For anyone who's still affected by this, you can contact our support team directly for further assistance with account and device specific information.

I'll also let the team know about this and will keep you posted with any updates. 

[Kuba2]

What do You mena by "update hardlinks"?

[mhasteley]

Yeah... the 'hardlinks' thing works, but very briefly: I suspect in the same way that quitting and reopening dropbox works very briefly. It interrupts the problem rather than solving it.

I can get it to reproduce very easily - it's whenever there's a file it can't sync (so says 'file is in use' if you hover over the system tray icon). And I use InDesign all the time, who's lock files fall into this category - so very easy to see it happen. If you close down the offending program, it'll sometimes realise and finish syncing and then is happy again. More often it gets fully stuck and you have restart Dropbox to clear it.

Never used to be like this - seems to be tied to a recentish update (though not the Dropbox for Windows Experience update https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-Cloud-Files-for-Windows/Updated-Dropbox-for-Windows-Experien... - as I have a Business account which hasn't updated to those new fangle native icons and that's also affected).

[keithrnorris]

Dropbox support is useless.  

[Daddictif]

Same problem here, you must find a quick fix for your client !

[dglarseniy]

Few days ago i started to fell that my Windows explorer began to work slow, like i need to wait while it is loading quick menu, when i press right click on file to rar it, i need to wait 5 seconds before menu opens, after a restart, all fine for random time, 10-20 mins then again, all stuck. (PC is half year old, work pc, i7-12700k, 32 ram, win 10, 2 SSD 2 tb each(MSI + ADATA), i thought maybe a virus, bought kasperskiy antivirus, it didnt help, nothing was found. So i thought maybe ssd is failing, i checked all ssd as possible, all fine. So i made an update to win 11....... Something that i didnt want to do, but i did, i thought maybe some windows fail. But it didnt help too. Then suddenly i saw my dropbox app was syncing something and for too long time, so i made it pause syncing, it didnt say to to me that sync is paused till some time like usual, just stuck on writing pausing. So i turned off dropbox and Win Explorer started to run fine. So i tested it a little more and this is what i have now, after every first dropbox sync, nvm what it is, win explorer stuck(i tried to delete 400 gb, the speed of delete is 1 FILE PER SECOND!!!!!!! when normal speed is close to 2000), i pause dropbox and then turn it off and all fine again. I tried to reisntall dropbox app, nothing. I have 200 gb of 2 tb space on it. And i have it isntalled on few laptops too and all fine there. What do u think about it?

[jnichol4]

Glad I finally found this thread. This has been driving me insane for the past week, and just now realized that Dropbox is the culprit. This needs to be fixed ASAP. Windows Explorer is almost unusable when running DB right now.