Dropboxcleanup.exe has stopped working - Windows 8.1

[zx80]

I get the popup error message "Dropboxcleanup.exe has stopped working" about once every hour. This has been happening in the last 12 hours so I assume there's been a recent update. I'm on 168.4.4802. The error is happening as Dropboxcleanup.exe says it can't find api-ms-win-core-heap-l2-1-0.dll.

Thanks.

[Hannah]

Thanks for this update, @MadamCaptain.

I'm glad to see that after renaming the .exe file, this message didn't show up again.

However, if you do come across this again, please let us know.

Thanks!

[Jeremy N.2]

I think the reason that your machine shows that Dropbox was installed recently is that Dropbox gets regular updates, and your machine is showing you the date that the most recent update was installed.

[Jeremy N.2]

I see that even when one clicks "Reply" to someone-else's post, this forum software does not then show what text one's reply was to.

I replied to the post made by "Aquaritone" (on 03-07-2023 at 07-02am), and said in reply to their comment that

   "Under "Add or Remove Programs" it says Dropbox was installed on my computer on 2/21/23.

   That is weird because Dropbox Desktop has been installed on my computer since 2015 I believe, and I have never touched it since"

that:

I think the reason that your machine shows that Dropbox was installed recently is that Dropbox gets regular updates, and your machine is showing you the date that the most recent update was installed.

[Jeremy N.2]

I'm also a Windows 8.1 user and I too have had this problem since it first started.

However (probably because I have my machine set up differently from most users) I've only seen the pop-up message about a specific missing DLL once.  The difference here is that (as a programmer, someone who regularly sends full application dumps to software companies so they can fix problems) I have Windows configured to take full dumps whenever any application has a problem.  Maybe that generally interferes with / prevents the pop-up message from appearing.

So every time that (probably) other users see a message, I get another application dump.  Windows manages these so there's not an every growing set of them - each time a new dump happens Windows deletes the oldest copy.  It also logs the problem in an eventlog record.  Interesting the eventlog record does not name the missing DLL; instead it describes the exact point in an executing program where the problem occurs.  That information is of no use to a user but it would enable Dropbox staff to fix this, if they'd only pay attention.

The times that the problem (and dumps) happen is the hourly interval at which two scheduled tasks (defined by Dropbox, not me) run to look for possible updates to Dropbox.  The task names are "DropboxUpdateTaskUserS-x-x-xx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxCore"  and  "DropboxUpdateTaskUserS-x-x-xx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxUA".   (The xxxx parts are the registry internal GUID names of the userid under which Dropbox runs on my system.)

These tasks run:  C:\Users\myuserid\AppData\Local\Dropbox\Update\DropboxUpdate.exe /c

and: C:\Users\myuserid\AppData\Local\Dropbox\Update\DropboxUpdate.exe /ua /installsource scheduler

and I expect that one of those actions probably tries to run DropboxCleanup.exe at the end of whatever else has been done.

I've already reported all of this (within ticket: 21118467 ) and offered copies of the dumps to Dropbox, who were not interested.  But that might be because then, this was still recorded as "solved".

Although my eventlog records did not say what the missing DLL was, the original reporter of this problem did say -

   "api-ms-win-core-heap-l2-1-0.dll"

I scanned my whole disk look for files whose name started "api-ms-win-core-heap" and found several copies (all slightly different internally, which is perfectly ok) in various applications, one in

  C:\Users\myuserid\AppData\Roaming\Dropbox\bin\168.4.4802

(which was the 'stable' version of Dropbox at the time; now it's \bin\169.4.5684)

The DLL shipped in all those applications (Dropbox and the others) was: api-ms-win-core-heap-l1-1-0.dll

which is NOT the DLL that DropboxCleanup.exe is looking for.  Note that the DLL that I have has an "L1" in its name but the one that is needed has an "L2".

I have no idea whether the issue is that Dropbox are shipping the wrong DLL, or whether their code is mistakenly trying to load the L2 version when it should be loading the L1 version.   Maybe Windows 10 and 11 have the L2 version but someone's forgotten that W8[.1] and maybe W7 don't?  But since Dropbox seem normally to ship standalone copies of these DLLs inside the application it seems odd to me that their code tries to load a DLL that they are not including in the application, when they DO include so many other DLLs including the older version of this one.

(I did also mention the DLL name discrepancy in my ticket.)

.

Moving on ... I'm sorry but I think that (Dropboxer) Hannah's recent comment  (Mon 13 Mar,  6:53pm):

   "I'm glad to see that after renaming the .exe file, this message didn't show up again."

is irresponsible.

The users are renaming part of the supplied/installed Dropbox application so that it cannot be found and run, to kill off an annoying error message.  This is a terrible way for users to get rid of an annoyance.  That part of Dropbox is surely MEANT TO BE RUN.  By renaming it those users are PREVENTING it from doing whatever it is meant to do.  No responsible /technical support/ person would ever see this as a solution.  But maybe Hannah isn't a technical support person?  But if she isn't, she shouldn't be commenting on a technical issue.

[Jeremy N.2]

Oh - and one other thing.  At no point in this problem has telling users to reinstall been sensible, UNLESS Dropbox support knew that they had missed the right DLL out of the installer and had since fixed that.

A missing DLL will not magically come back until Dropbox ship it.

All that reinstalls do is waste users' time.

[Aquaritone]

@Jeremy N.2
Thanks for your reply. I have made no attempts to fix the issue, but the error message has stopped appearing for about the last week. Dropbox is now showing up on my computer as having been updated on 3/8/23, so maybe that update contained a fix. I'll post if I get the error message again.

[evilgrin72]

FINALLY, someone talking good sense.  Thank you Jeremy - this is what is happening to me as well - I even downloaded the missing .dll from the internet and put it in that C:\Users\myuserid\AppData\Roaming\Dropbox\bin\169.4.5684 folder and I still get the message every hour or so.  I'm completely at my wit's end and am days away from finding another solution to my cloud storage needs.  I'm not super computer-savvy and so tried all the "solutions" presented here and nothing worked.  I've since undone them all (I only wish I could get the time it took to do 6 uninstalls/re-installs back) because none made any difference.  If the whole issue stems from missing that one .dll file, any idea why downloading and extracting it to that folder referenced above didn't stop the error?  FYI - I'm using Windows 10 Pro and getting this error, so it's not unique to 7 and 8....

[Jeremy N.2]

@Aquaritone, @evilgrin72 

I mentioned above that when I searched my system for instances of one of the DLLs I found several (not just in the Dropbox \bin folder), and that although the ones I found all had the same name, they had slightly different contents.  In fact they had different "hashes" (a sort of fingerprint of the contents) and different sizes.  I said that was ok; the reason I think that's so is that I think they'd been compiled on different dates, or perhaps released by Microsoft after there's been Windows Updates applied to the code that they are created from.

(DLLs are standard sets of 'functions' which many programs need to call, packaged up separately so that each program doesn't have to have its own copy of those permanently inside it.   The "api-ms-win-core-heap-l2-1-0.dll" one I'd /guess/ is used for "heap" management - which is to do with how a program grabs, uses, and later frees up lots of small amounts of memory, which are sort of conceptually in a heap somewhere; the "api-ms-win-core-registry-l1-1-0.dll" one is presumably for access to the registry.

These specific DLLs might be part of the Microsoft .Net programming frameworks ... of which there's several.  As well as a first DLL not being able to be found and loaded, maybe there's a wider issue - perhaps Dropbox expect us all to have a newer version of .NET installed, perhaps something that uptodate instances of Win 10 / 11 have but only some W8[.1]/W7 systems have.  Maybe there's a whole set of DLLs etc that the code would need to load and we're only hearing of the first failure - because after one failure there's no point in the code continuing to try to load others.)

Anyway, the first problem if you find a version of the same-named DLL somewhere on the internet and download it is - it might not be the exact version that the Dropbox application expects to see.  Once a DLL has been loaded I'd /guess/ that the program that asked it to be loaded can eg check its loaded length, and (certainly) check what routines it contains.  Maybe one of those checks means the version you found wasn't in some sense acceptable.

It's also extremely unsafe to grab copies of DLLs from arbitary websites - you've no idea if the code within them has been modified to do anything malicious.

It's possible that Dropbox know the exact hash/fingerprint of the version they expect to have loaded and check that ... and the one(s) you've tried aren't the one that Dropbox should have shipped. 

Another possibility is that /some/ DLLs need to be registered (not that I know exactly what that does).  Installers issue the command that does that as well as placing the DLL(s) in whatever location is required.  I hesitate to suggest that you issue the same command because I don't know if there's a downside to doing so.

[evilgrin72]

Thanks so much for this information, I'm learning a lot reading your posts.  Seeing as it did nothing to stop the error messages, I'm going to delete that .dll I downloaded.

Looks like there's really nothing left that I can do except uninstall the program and use One Drive or something like that.  I can't deal with these popping up every hour or so when I'm in the middle of doing work.  Thanks again.

[Jeremy N.2]

@evilgrin72 

I suppose what's best depends on whether or not Dropbox support finally address the problem /properly/.

In the short term, if we assume that the scheduled tasks that get run have to continue running (I mean, you don't want Dropbox to stop applying updates to itself) then deleting the scheduled tasks is not sensible.  You could possibly change them though so that they don't run during your normal working hours.

One of them only runs once per day (but it's possible that one of the things it does is make sure that the definition of the other scheduled tasks is still present, and possibly also, 'correct').

The other one is defined to run once (at the same time as the first one) plus 23 more times at hourly intervals.  It's not possible (at least not in W8.1) to make it run eg every 6 hours, though I suspect it could be made to start at whatever is the time of day one stops working and then only run hourly for a smaller number of times.  But it might well get redefined by the other scheduled task even if one does that, and if it does one would need to edit its definition every day.

Another possibility is to provide Dropbox with a file named "DropboxCleanup.exe" which IS a program, but is not the cleanup one.  I have two small programs both of which do absolutely nothing when run and are designed (if that's the word) to be used in situations where a named program must exist (for some application to work properly) but one doesn't want anything to happen when they are run.  I'll experiment and see if I can get Dropbox to run either or both of these rather than the real cleanup program.

There is a problem with this, which is that for all we know, DropboxCleanup might actually be doing a whole set of things properly and then after those - maybe - having the DLL error and stopping.  Replacing it with a dummy program means it won't do anything at all.