Child Item

Windows file explorer crashes when renaming Dropbox folders/files

I've been using DropBox happily with Windows File Explorer for years. I'm on Windows 11 and fully updated on the Windows and DropBox.

I've recently hit a problem when I try to rename files or folders in DropBox. The renaming happens, but then the spinning blue circle comes on, and after about 5s, File Explorer crashes. When File Explorer restarts, the change has happened but I have to navigate all the way back to where I was working. So nothing disastrous, but a real pain, and clearly shouldn't happen.

This behaviour doesn't happen with non-DropBox files/folders.

I have done a system file integrity check. I have deleted and re-installed DropBox completely. But the problem remains.

My DropBox version is 220.4.4126. The DropBox is nearly 100Gb in total, but there aren't any super-big files there.

Any ideas how I might fix this?

Find more posts tagged with

Desktop

Sync

Windows

Insightful

Closed - Partially Delivered

Delivered

Accepted answers

wetenhr

Sorry, thought I'd responded earlier on this but I can't see it in the thread.

Jay, Nancy, thanks for your replies. I tried quitting the DropBox app and seeing if that affected things, but unfortunately it didn't. Same behaviour.

Then I picked up elsewhere that this kind of behaviour can be related to file corruption in Windows. So I ran DISM and SFC checks on my system. These found and corrected some file corruption errors BUT didn't actually fix the issue.

By now I figured the finger was pointing to Windows rather than DropBox so I decided to do a repair install of Windows 11. Took about an hour to run, but it has fixed the problem.

kartel89, hope this might be of some help to you.

All comments

Jay

Hi @wetenhr, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

If you quit the Dropbox desktop application entirely from the system tray, does the behavior occur again when renaming files and folders?

This will help me to assist further!

kartel89

Hi @Jay I'm also experiencing the same issue with Dropbox 220.4.4126. I'm using Windows 11 which is fully updated and I've also done the integrity check and tried to reinstall Dropbox.

The issue is also occurring for me when adding files to Dropbox in the desktop app.

I have tried quitting the application from the system tray but the behaviour remains.

Nancy

Hey @kartel89! Sorry for jumping in.

So, to clarify, your File Explorer crashes when renaming and adding files to your Dropbox folder. Correct?

If the behavior persists when the Dropbox app isn’t running, then this may not necessarily be linked to Dropbox.

To further test this though, if you take the same actions, but in a different folder on your computer (outside of Dropbox), are you having the same issue?