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I see a small file box next to my Microsoft files and I can no longer open them.

Just recently, most (but not all) of my documents and spreadsheets have small file box icon in front of the Word doc logo and will not let me open them. This has only occurred with document in my dropbox, not on my internal computer documents.

For background, I have had dropbox for many years and have never seen this before.

I have plenty of storage space left because I thought that might be it, but apparently not.

Does anyone know what this is? And, how to open these files?

Thanks so much,

Keith

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Nancy

Hi @keith gold! Thanks for posting this on our forum.

Does the icon that you describe resemble a brown box, like the one showing here?

If yes, this is usually a OneDrive icon and not a Dropbox one. Does OneDrive have access to the files within your local Dropbox folder perhaps?

In case you see something different though, please send me a screenshot of the icon here, so that I can take a closer look. I'd also like a screenshot of what you see when trying to open those files on your computer.

Let me know once you have more info.

keith gold

Thanks Nancy. Unfortunately I cannot open the image you sent. However, I have been in my one drive folders and there are no dropbox documents there.

The image is the standard Word doc icon (big W on a piece of paper) with a small yellowish file box image in the bottom left of the icon (it is about 1/4 of the image). My normal Word docs that I can open do not have that small file box icon in front of the Word Icon.

Word was unable to read this document. It may be corrupt. Try one or more of the following: Open and Repair the file. Or, Open the file with the Text Recovery converter.

Tried both and neither worked.

Rich

https://www.poremsky.com/windows/brown-file-drawer-icon-windows-11/

Hannah

Hey @keith gold, make sure to check Rich's link here and try to temporarily disable OneDrive to see if that helps.

Keep us posted.

keith gold

I tried to reset one drive but it did not work. Cannot understand the steps to uninstall it even from Microsoft.

Is there something I can do?

keith gold

Finally figured out how to uninstall one drive and it did not solve the issue. Do i need to now also uninstall dropbox and reinstall it. Already tried a computer restart

Nancy

Thanks for updating us! If you’re not on a free Basic account with more than 3 devices currently linked, you can go ahead and reinstall the Dropbox app as the next step, since the issue remains.