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 there @William F.5 - sorry to hear about this.

Can you please clarify you're device's exact OS version and the version and status of the Dropbox desktop app as shown in your system tray?

Did you reboot your computer since you first noticed this? 

[dhannah]

I tried what you suggested. It seemed to be running smoothly after I uninstalled Dropbox, turned off antivirus, restarted computer and installed Dropbox again. But when I turned my antivirus back on after a day or two, I started having the problems again. Not sure if it was related.

Is there any way to have it working smoothly and not need to turn my antivirus off? I will need some form of antivirus on my computer. 

[Nancy]

In this case, I’d like you to take one extra step and whitelist Dropbox on your antivirus (since the issue seems to be related to this). Let me know if that helps at all.

[dhannah]

I opened a ticket with my antivirus provider (Symantec) and went through a few system checks. When I turn off my antivirus using the run command, I'm still experiencing issues. We also went through all the logs in Symantec and nothing was coming up on any of the logs for trying to access Dropbox. The technician was confidence that Symantec was not causing Dropbox to slow down.

Just as a refresher, when I uninstalled Dropbox and reinstalled it, Dropbox was working smoothly for about 1 or 2 days; however, the Dropbox I'm using is for work and we have over 1.5 TB of storage on Dropbox. When I set it up, I chose to have all new files as "Online-Only" to not take up too much space on my hard drive. Over about a week, Dropbox was downloading files. Sometimes the space on my laptop was filled (not sure why because I had selected Online-Only), but eventually, after about a week, everything was Synced and up to date on the Dropbox application. Like I mentioned before, I started to have issues with the folder again after about 1 or 2 days of syncing Dropbox. So, something happened after 1 or 2 days that caused my computer to slow down and based on my conversation with the Symantec support technician, it's not related to my antivirus.

Do you have any additional suggestions that I could try?

[Walter]

Hey @dhannah - sorry to hear you're still  having issues with this.

Could you try creating a brand new OS profile on your computer and try to install and run the desktop app  there?

Do you notice the same behavior there by any chance? 

[dhannah]

By "creating a brand new OS profile on your computer", do you mean creating another User in Windows 10?

And by "try to install and run the desktop app  there?" do you mean try to sync using the same Dropbox profile that I'm troubleshooting with now? If that's what you  mean, I don't have enough space on my drive and even if I did, it would take a few days to a week to sync everything onto the new user.

I would have to unsync everything from my current Dropbox, create a new user, then sync everything to the new user. And then I would have to try using it for a few days to see if the issue has resolved.

That would be pretty disruptive to my workflow over the next week. Is there anything else I could try? I'm just not sure what that would determine...

[Walter]

This would show us if there's some sort of mis-configuration, setting, policy or permission restriction or even some 3rd party app or process that's causing issues on your original OS profile @dhannah 

In any case, the link I provided before leads to the most recent, stable version of the desktop app so I'd like you to check if you're already updated to that too.

Keep me posted with any updates!

[Robert 098]

Same here. A few weeks ago we where asked by dropbox to completely reinstall. Before my dropbox always slowed my Windows 10 Explorer, like when I try to access a folder or save a file it took Minutes before I could save the file because the "Save as" Window was "hanging/lagging out". Same with renaming folders. After the re-install Dropbox worked fine for a few weeks until last Friday. Now again, everything is slow and you often can't work with it efficiently. We also work as a team on Terabytes of shared files.

[Nancy]

@Robert 098, can you send me any ticket numbers you may have from your support convo? I can take a look, and guide you from there.

[e3ecodesign]

Same Problem here